Interactive Contemporary Art 9780755603350, 9780755605002

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List of Illustrations 1.1 Psychoanalysis on Trial by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: the analyst and the public. Photo: Jari Nieminen, courtesy of Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland. 1.2 Psychoanalysis on Trial, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: the court; on the left: Striking the Right Chord, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011. Photo: Jari Nieminen, courtesy of Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland. 1.3 Psychoanalysis on Trial, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: three medieval fools and, on the right, Antonin Artaud as members of the court. Photo: Jari Nieminen, courtesy of Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland. 1.4 Psychoanalysis on Trial, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: the public of fools, cheering and laughing when the analyst is being accused. Video still. 2.1 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Two Origins, Relational Architecture 7, 2002. Place du Capitole, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France. Photo by Antimodular Research. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

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2.2 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Re:Positioning Fear, Relational Architecture 3, 1997. Landeszeughaus, Architecture and Media Biennale, Graz, Austria. Photo by Joerg Mohr. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 2.3 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6, 2003. Duisburg Akzente Festival, Duisburg, Germany. Photo by Antimodular Research. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 2.4 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan, Relational Architecture 11, 2008. Trafalgar Square, London, UK. Photo by Antimodular Research. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 2.5 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Amodal Suspension, Relational Architecture 8, 2003. Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan. Photo by ArchiBiMing. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 3.1 Nicola Grobler, Small Victories during Cape 09: Convergence, Cape Town Metrorail station with Meschac Gaba’s Ambulant in the foreground, May 2009. Image: Roland Metcalfe. 3.2 Thank You Driver (2009). Minibus taxis were identified by the Thank You Driver slogan in their rear windows. Image: Cape Africa Platform. 3.3 Nicola Grobler, Small Victories (2007–8): Mr Khan/The Scarf King (Durbanite, jack-of-all), August 2008. 3.4 Nicola Grobler, Small Victories (2009): Mr T (Heideveld, gangster), June 2009. 3.5 Nasti´o Mosquito, Dreams and Illusions, on the Wynberg taxi route. Image: Cape Africa Platform. 3.6 Sculpture from Edwige Aplogan’s Deader than the Future. Image: Cape Africa Platform. 3.7 Explaining the process of Small Victories during Cape 09: Convergence, Cape Town Metrorail station, June 2009. Photo: Roland Metcalfe.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

4.1 Andrew K¨otting, Word Map of the British Coastline (1996). Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London. 4.2 Still from Andrew K¨otting’s Gallivant (1996). Image courtesy of BFI and the artist. 4.3 Screenshot of the Nowhereisland website at www.nowhereisland.org (December 2012). 4.4 Nowhereisland welcomed into Newquay Harbor (23 August 2012). Photograph by Joel Robinson. 5.1 Walkabout, 2011. Event still, Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town. Photograph by Jonx Pillemer. 5.2 From Walkabout archive: fragment on studio wall from letter by Robert Morris to John Cage in 1962. In the letter Morris proposed a new work then titled The Box with the Sound of Making Inside. 5.3 Walkabout with Kathryn Smith, 2011, serialworks, Cape Town. Photograph by Jonx Pillemer. 5.4 Conversations Two, 2011. Video still, Arena Theatre, Cape Town. 5.5 What We Speak About when We Speak About Art, 2010. Screenshot from video performance at Dadasouth? symposium, Iziko Musuem, Cape Town. 5.6 From Walkabout archive: image of mini-bus taxis at intersection of Twist and Plain streets in Johannesburg inner city, South Africa. Photographed from DorotheeKreutzfeldt, Plasticienne, 2010. Image published courtesy of Kreutzfeldt and Les e´ ditions de l’œil. 5.7 From Walkabout archive: ‘Thinking makes it so – Willem Boshoff’. Quoted from presentation by Boshoff at Dadasouth? symposium, Iziko Musuem, Cape Town, 2008. 5.8 From Walkabout archive: ‘How to collect thoughts?’ 5.9 From Walkabout archive: Cup and Wheel, 2012. 5.10 From Walkabout archive: experiment with a notebook design that allows notes to be jumbled and then easily returned to principal order.

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5.11 From Walkabout archive: ‘Rule Maker, Outcome Evaluator, Random Performer’. Conceived of as a model for the artist as complex dynamic system. 5.12 Francis Burger, Action Reflection Diagram, 2012. Graphic. Dimensions variable. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 5.13 Allora and Calzadilla, Returning a Sound, 2004. Image provided courtesy of the artists. 5.14 Jared Ginsburg, Hoist, 2011. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 5.15 From Walkabout archive: Nuts on Block in Studio, 2012. 5.16 From Walkabout archive: Finding Wittgenstein’s Clicker, Wits University, 2011. This shutter release was found on the floor and kept in my jacket pocket to privately ‘capture’ moments by clicking. 5.17 Barend de Wet, Douglas Gimberg, and Christian Nerf, Act 038 (Acting on Orders), c. 2008. Image provided courtesy of the artists. 5.18 From Walkabout archive: ‘Template’. 5.19 From Walkabout archive: Keys at a flea market, Venice, 2010. 5.20 Book of Babel, 2008. Hiddingh Hall, Cape Town. 5.21 Francis Burger, The Indulgence and Exhaustion of the Meaningless Voice: BA1-BB102 (detail), 2008–10. Photographic collage. Dimensions variable. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 5.22 From Walkabout archive: plug network in Paul Ressel’s studio, 2008. 5.23 From Walkabout archive: Pippa Skotnes’s office library with books arranged by colour. This allows searching for a book based on a memory of its cover. 5.24 Jared Ginsburg, untitled photograph, 2011. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 5.25 From Walkabout archive: ‘Reservoir walks’.

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5.26 From Walkabout archive: lino blocks printed into notebook, Artist Proof Studios, Johannesburg, 2011. 5.27 Protocol, 2010. Dynamic installation (a conversation between a fan and a computer), Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town. 5.28 Research Art, Magic Sand (performed for The Proposal Project). 2011. Video still. Dimensions variable. Image provided courtesy of the artists. 5.29 Christian Nerf. Plantsculpture (2002 – ongoing). Photograph by Brett Rubin. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 5.30 From Walkabout archive: man searching for lost precious metals (coins etc.), Camps Bay beach, Cape Town, video still. 5.31 From Walkabout archive: ‘Use it, its art’ [sic]. 5.32 From Walkabout archive: Operating Theatre, Pathology Laboratory, University of Cape Town. 5.33 From Walkabout archive: Elements of a Pocket Watch, Nina Liebenberg’s Studio. 5.34 Handspring Puppet Company and William Kentridge, Woyzeck on the Highveld, The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 2008. Adrian Kohler (left) and Louis Seboko with puppet Woyzeck. Photo Credit John Hodgkiss. Image provided courtesy of the artists. 5.35 From Walkabout archive: ‘Thought Acts’, screenshot. 5.36 Cards employed to conclude this chapter. 6.1 Warren Neidich, Book Exchange, 2010. Glenn Horowitz Gallery, East Hampton, New York. Steel, wood and books. Installation view with participants. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 6.2 Warren Neidich, Education of the Eye, 2010, Berlin. Performative installation. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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6.3 Warren Neidich, The Noologist’s Handbook, 2011, Skopje. Performance. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 6.4 Warren Neidich, The Infinite Replay of One’s Own Self-Destruction, 2012. Installation with set of speakers, tools, sound. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 7.1 From the performance of Marina Abramovi´c, The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 March–31 May 2010. Marina Abramovi´c – Day 47 (24 April). Portraits in the Presence of Marina c Abramovi´c by Marco Anelli 2010. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery. 7.2 From the performance of Marina Abramovi´c, The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 March–31 May 2010. Visitor #1541 – 5 minutes. Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c c by Marco Anelli 2010. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery. 7.3 From the performance of Marina Abramovi´c, The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 March–31 May 2010. Visitor #0492 – 35 minutes. Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c c by Marco Anelli 2010. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery. 8.1 Still from Shlomi Yaffe, How I Changed My Ideology in Prague Market (2006), eight minutes, digital video. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 8.2 Kristina Norman, After-War (2009), still from documentation of performance on 9 May 2009, 12 minutes, digital video. Image provided courtesy of the artist. 8.3 Still showing Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno visiting Bhopal, from The Yes Men, The Yes Men Fix The World (2009), 87 minutes, digital video. Image provided courtesy of The Yes Men. 9.1 Mike Parr, Rules & Displacement Activities Part III, 1977–1983 iii. Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(the ‘Armchop’), 1977. Performers: Geoff Parr, Maxa Parr, Mike Parr, Tim Parr, Julie Brown, Tony Parr, Felizitas Parr, Adrian Parr, Elizabeth Ducrou, Leon Dorney, Michiel Dolk, Bill Brown, Chris Tillam. 16mm camera: Misha Nussinov. Video Systems: Barry Creecy and a two-camera film crew in the broadcast van of the Australian Film and Television School. Sound: Matt Butler, Production: Chris Tillam, Elizabeth Ducrou, Leon Dorney, Julie Brown, Felizitas Parr. Photographer: John Delacour, Felizitas Parr. Editing: Mike Parr. Sculpture Centre, The Rocks, NSW, Australia. Performer: Mike Parr. Photographer: John Delacour. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery. 9.2 Mike Parr, Malevich (A Political Arm), performance for as long as possible, 3–5 May 2002. Artspace, Woolloomooloo, NSW, Australia. Performer: Mike Parr. Photographers: Paul Green, Felizitas Parr. 16mm camera: Mark Bliss. Sound: Tiegan Kollosch´e. Video: Adam Geczy. Co-performer: Garry Manson. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery. 9.3 Mike Parr, Close the Concentration Camps, six-hour performance, 15 June 2002. Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne. Performer: Mike Parr. Photographers: Paul Green, Felizitas Parr. 16mm camera: Mark Bliss. Sound: Tiegan Kollosch´e. Video Systems: courtesy Monash University Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery. 9.4 Mike Parr, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture), 30 hour performance, 2–3 May 2003. Artspace, Woolloomooloo, NSW, Australia. Performer: Mike Parr. Photographers: Paul Green, Felitizas Parr, Dobrila Stamenovic. 16mm camera: Mark Bliss. Sound: Tiegan Kollosch´e. Video: Adam Geczy. Co-performer: Felizitas Parr and internet

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audience. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery. Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2012. Designed by c Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei Herzog & c de Meuron/Ai Weiwei. Image 2012 Iwan Baan. Taste it! Stedelijk Museuem, Amsterdam. Photo Ernst van Deursen, 2010, Installation Katja Gruiters. Augment It! Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photo Ernst van Deursen, 2012. Aernout Mik, Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, 2011, installation view with Exhibition Architecture (After Constant Nieuwenhuys’s Design for a Gypsy Camp). Photo: Victor Nieuwenhuys. Freee Art Collective, Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! (Emmanuel Street renamed as Colonel Despard Walk), 2009, performance still. Photograph courtesy of the artists. Freee Art Collective, Manifesto reading of the Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art at the Exhibition by Freee entitled, ‘How to Make a Difference’, International Project Space, Birmingham (2007). Photograph courtesy of the artists. Freee Art Collective, reading of The Manifesto for a New Public at the bandstand, Clapham Common, London (2012). Photograph courtesy of the artists.

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Contributors MIEKE BAL is a cultural theorist and critic based in Amsterdam (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis). Her interests range from antiquity to seventeenth-century and contemporary art, modern literature, feminism, migratory culture, and mental illness. Her books include Of What One Cannot Speak (2010), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), and Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002). She has also co-directed a series of experimental documentaries. Her video installation Nothing is Missing continues to be displayed (2006–present). Her fiction film A Long History of Madness and related exhibitions have toured internationally (with Michelle Williams Gamaker). Currently their exhibition Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism is being shown in various places around the world. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. www.miekebal.org KATHRYN BROWN is Assistant Professor of art history at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She is author of Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Ashgate, 2012) and has published widely on nineteenthand twentieth-century French painting and literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art. Recent articles have appeared in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, American Art, the Forum for Modern Language Studies, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Kent (UK), the University of British Columbia (Canada), Tulane University (USA), and the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. She edited The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Ashgate, 2013) and is currently completing a book on the livres d’artiste of Henri Matisse. xv

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FREEE ART COLLECTIVE: Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt, and Mel Jordan work collectively as the Freee Art Collective. Freee is concerned with the publishing and dissemination of ideas and the formation of opinions constituting the public sphere. Their works combine text (as slogan), print, sculptural props, installation, video photography, and montage. Freee attempts to complicate the notion of the convivial in social practice and to develop new theories of place and space. Freee’s recent exhibitions include: We are Grammar (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, 2011), Touched (Liverpool Biennial 2010), and When Guests Become Hosts (Culturgest, Porto, Portugal, 2010). www.freee.org.uk. JOSH GINSBURG is an artist and curator based in Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a degree in electromechanical engineering and a Masters in fine art (University of Cape Town). Guided by an interest in the architecture of memory, his practice centres on the development and performance of networked digital archives. These performances take form through presentations, conversations, and improvised cinematic tours. Ginsburg also applies strategies from this practice to collections of artworks by third parties. This curatorial service provides fluid navigation across both digital representations of a given collection and dynamic vantage points from which to engage with it. Ginsburg undertakes his studio practice at the University of Stellenbosch, and lectures at the Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT) in unstable media and interactive arts. He is cofounder with Francis Burger and Jared Ginsburg of Research Art, an experimental research agency, and works from Atlantic House in Maitland. www.joshginsburg.net NICOLA GROBLER is a practising artist and lecturer in fine arts in the department of visual arts at the University of Pretoria. Her research interests include art and agency, ecological aesthetics, and participatory art in the South African context. She exhibits widely, recently as a participant in AtWork27 at the Afropixel 3 festival during the Dakar Biennale, Senegal, and at the Bulgarian Institute for Culture in Hamburg, Germany. Her solo exhibitions include The Enigma Machine (2004) and 4-Auto Stroke (2006). She is currently pursuing a practice-led PhD in ecological aesthetics and the everyday. SUSAN JAROSI is Associate Professor of art history at the University of Louisville, where she teaches courses on contemporary art and visual

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CONTRIBUTORS

culture since 1950. Her areas of specialisation lie in the histories of performance art, experimental film and video, trauma studies, and the modes of exchange between art and science. Her essays have appeared in the journals Screen, Art History, Art and Documentation, and in the books The Fluxus Reader and Blood Orgies: Hermann Nitsch in America. She is currently completing a book on the representation of traumatic subjectivity in contemporary art, entitled Picturing Trauma: A Holographic Paradigm. JENNIFER KALIONIS is currently completing a PhD at the University of Adelaide (South Australia) entitled ‘Ethical Spectatorship: Audience, Artist and the Issue of Trust in Contemporary Art 1968–2010’. Her primary research interests lie in performance art and explorations of the relationship between artists and their audiences. She also works as a freelance arts writer, and has published essays and reviews in Artlink, Art Monthly, Eyeline, and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture Broadsheet, and has presented her research at conferences in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She has a background in arts management and has held positions as gallery director of the Adelaide Central Gallery and as manager of community arts and culture at the City of Prospect (South Australia). She is also a non-practising lawyer. JOEL ROBINSON is a researcher in the history of art, architecture, and landscape, with a specialisation in the modern and contemporary periods. He is the author of Life in Ruins: Architectural Culture and the Question of Death in the Twentieth Century (2008), and co-editor of a new compilation of source texts in art history entitled Art and Visual Culture: A Reader (2012) and editor of the winter 2014 issue of the Open Arts Journal entitled Pavilions. He currently lectures for the Open University (UK) and practises freelance journalism for a number of art magazines. MARGRIET SCHAVEMAKER is Head of Collections and Research at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Prior to joining the Stedelijk, she was an assistant professor in the art history and media studies departments of the University of Amsterdam. Schavemaker has written extensively on contemporary art and theory, co-edited several volumes – including Now is the Time: Art and Theory in the 21st Century (2009) and Vincent Everywhere: Van Gogh’s (Inter) National Identities (2010) – and is an acclaimed curator of discursive events and public programs.

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CLAUDIA SLANAR is an art historian and experimental scholar from Vienna who works at the intersection of critical theory and artistic practice focusing on the performativity of historical narratives. Slanar’s latest curatorial project (with Georgia Holz), With A Name Like Yours, You Might Be Any Shape, was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Center of the University of California Irvine in 2012. In 2008 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the California Institute of the Arts. She is the co-editor of a monograph on experimental filmmaker James Benning (2007), and is currently preparing a catalogue raisonn´e of the work of 1970s conceptual artist Laura Wollen. Her essays have been published in books and exhibition catalogues, including Moving Landscapes (Vienna, 2006), Matrix: Gender/Relations/Revisions (Vienna, 2008), and Narcissism (Los Angeles, 2012). JULIET STEYN publishes on art and cultural criticism, focusing on art, the politics of memory and identity, and the language of display in museums and galleries. Her publications include The Jew: Assumptions of Identity (1999) and the collection Other than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art (1997). Recent work includes an anthology with Nadja Stamselberg, Breaching Borders: Art, Migrants and Metaphors of Waste (I.B.Tauris, 2012); ‘The Vicissitudes of Representation’, in Challenging Histories (2012); and ‘Blind Spots of Representation’, in Art and the Politics of Visibility: Contesting the Global Local and the In-Between (I.B.Tauris, forthcoming, 2015). HARRY WEEKS is a teaching fellow and doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. His PhD ‘A Unique Epochal Knot: Negotiations of Community in Contemporary Art’ examines the relationship between contemporary art practice and post-communist politics. He curated the ‘Ethics, Nationalism and the Theatrics of Documentation’ Film Lounge programme at Stills, Edinburgh in 2011 and Economy Reading Room (CCA, Glasgow; Stills, Edinburgh, 2013). His writing has been published by CITSEE.eu and e-ir.info, and he has contributed to numerous publications in the Baltic states. He has spoken extensively at conferences in the United Kingdom as well as at the New School in New York and at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, and he convened the ‘Feminisms of Multitudes’ session at the 2012 AAH annual conference.

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Introduction Kathryn Brown

Audience participation has become a familiar and established aspect of aesthetic practice in the contemporary artworld. Museum visitors are no longer surprised by invitations to contribute actively to the production and display of artworks, to meet the artist, to play roles in fictional worlds, or to engage with objects that test the range and limits of sensory experience. As a style of making or a curatorial strategy, audience engagement is now regularly employed for the purposes of reorienting the relationship between individuals and art institutions and questioning the power structures that have been associated with notions of single authorship. The widespread incorporation of participatory practices into contemporary art has generated a considerable critical literature, much of which focuses on the social impact of this style of artwork. Nicolas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics, has become a key point of reference for discussions of this subject.1 For Bourriaud, ‘interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts’ defined art of the 1990s.2 He argued that these concepts not only informed innovative approaches to the making, installation, and reception of artworks, but also demanded the creation of a new critical vocabulary that would adequately express the originality and relevance of this style of art production.3 In Bourriaud’s account, participatory works by Gabriel Orozco, Jens

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Haaning, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others, are capable of carving out interstices of experience within everyday life. These are understood to be valuable spaces in which art can stimulate the production of micro-communities, generate an awareness of shared interests between strangers, and trigger unexpected forms of improvisatory exchange.4 Taken together, Bourriaud’s essays offer the vision of a contemporary aesthetic education of the participant; in this process art becomes a terrain for ‘social experiments’ that are capable of enriching interpersonal relations and countering the uniformity of routine behaviour.5 Bourriaud’s emphasis on the positive social impact of participatory artworks has, however, been subject to criticism. In the writings of Claire Bishop, for example, such works often fail to live up to the utopian aspirations of artists and critics through their failure to reflect adequately on their placement and reception within the broader institutional context in which they are staged or exhibited.6 The result, for Bishop, is that the ‘quality of relationships’ fostered by such works remains unquestioned by those who make, experience, and judge them.7 She illustrates her argument by examining Tiravanija’s transformations of gallery spaces into makeshift kitchens in which participants have an opportunity to share food in an unexpectedly convivial arena.8 According to Bishop, rather than creating new communities, participatory works such as these are open primarily to a cadre of artworld insiders, and thus facilitate dialogues between people who already share an identifiable set of interests.9 In consequence, such works’ potential for fostering democratic principles or generating a terrain for social experimentation is severely curtailed. In a complementary line of argument, Grant Kester has noted some of the difficulties that can ensue when participatory practices thought to have supposedly ‘universal’ appeal ignore the ‘specificity and complexity of local art and cultural production’, including the political and economic disparities that exist within and between communities and nations.10 In his books Conversation Pieces and The One and the Many, Kester pays specific attention to the role that site plays in the creation and execution of artworks that involve dialogue with, and exchange between, members of a community.11 His analyses of the various ‘conversations’ that such works can or cannot bring about highlight the pitfalls of envisaging ‘participation’ as a unitary style or concept.

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INTRODUCTION

The parameters of the critical discussion outlined above reveal a specific characteristic of participatory artworks: regardless of their theme, the mere fact of bringing people directly into their processes and outcomes makes a socio-political interpretation of such works, to some extent, inevitable. Putting the point more broadly, Bishop notes that ‘in any art that uses people as a medium, ethics will never retreat entirely’.12 The need to have regard to the implications of participation both at the level of the individual and that of the institutional context in which the artwork is embedded makes it difficult to generalize about this particular style of art production. The purpose of this collection of essays is, therefore, to examine how strategies of audience participation are used (and to what effect) in a variety of local and specific contexts. In an era when participation has become a familiar artistic praxis, this volume pays critical attention to the different types of dialogue that such works seek to foster with specific audiences. This approach is taken in the conviction that the critical concerns I have noted are best addressed by determining how participatory artworks function within discrete frames of reference. The following contributions from academics, artists, and museum professionals focus on case studies involving artworks that have been exhibited, performed, or staged in public spaces or galleries in Europe, the United States, Asia, South Africa, and Australia. Essays cast their net over works in contrasting media and forms (some of which have not featured prominently in discussions of participatory art), including film, computer art, happenings, performance, body art, land art, researchbased art, and printed manifestos. By focusing on the breadth of media in which such works are produced and acknowledging that ‘participation’ is neither a universal style nor a single type of experience, this book aims to uncover the diversity and interpretive density of artworks that solicit interactivity, and to examine the art-historical traditions to which they are indebted or from which they seek to break free.13 Just as the idea of ‘participation’ demands that attention be paid to specific contexts of production and reception, so too the notion of the ‘art audience’ itself demands a similarly cautious approach. As T.J. Clark argues in his study of Gustave Courbet’s painting, we should not think of the public as an ‘identifiable “thing” whose needs the artist notes, satisfies, or rejects’, but rather as a fantasy that exists within

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both the artwork and the processes that led to its creation.14 This point becomes particularly important in the analysis of artworks that employ participation as an aesthetic strategy. In order to understand the nature of the invitation extended by such works, we need to examine the notion of the ‘audience’ that informs their structure and execution. As some of the essays contained in this book make clear, audiences do not necessarily conform to the fantasy of the ideal participant that is embedded in the artwork’s structure. Instead, the network of transactions between artist, artwork, audience, curator, and gallery is often rendered unstable by the inclusion of participatory practices. While this instability can provoke some of the ‘friction’ that Bishop identifies as key to productive exchange in this style of artwork, it also opens up new ways in which works might fail, as invitations to participate are turned down, particular roles are rejected, or ethical dilemmas are deliberately left unresolved in a way that defeats the purpose of the work.15 While the term ‘participation’ is used throughout this book, the following essays have been grouped under the heading of ‘interactive contemporary art’. It is worth clarifying why this decision has been taken. As Dominic McIver Lopes notes in his study of computer art, the term ‘interactivity’ is often problematic because it has too many meanings: ‘it means so many different things in so many different situations that it’s hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all definition’.16 For the purposes of Lopes’s study, the term ‘interactive’ is used to capture the idea that the contribution of the participant or user changes the display of the work; this aspect of the computer art form is prescribed in specific ways by the artist, and distinguishes it from works in traditional media such as painting or sculpture.17 In the latter cases, the work’s display is fixed at the time it leaves the hand of the artist. Lopes’s approach to the idea of interactivity is helpful because it draws attention not just to a process of exchange between artist, artwork, and audience, but also to the impact of that exchange on the look or display of the work. Extending this idea beyond the field of computer art, Berys Gaut argues that, in interactive artworks, members of the audience assume a ‘performance’ role in relation to the content of the work; as a result, they ‘partly determine its instances and their features’ in a way that is vital to their own appreciation of the work.18 Gaut’s description is important in the context of the

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INTRODUCTION

following discussions because it highlights the point that an audience member’s assumption of a ‘performance’ role is not just relevant to the instantiation of the work, but is also an integral component of the latter’s aesthetic effect. This idea helps to address one of the problems that Bishop has identified in recent critical discussions of participatory works, namely, how to integrate discussions of their social and processbased aspects into a critical engagement with such works as aesthetic phenomena in their own right.19 In Artificial Hells, Bishop identifies ‘interactivity’ as primarily a ‘oneto-one relationship’ that is distinct from multi-vocal participatory art forms.20 As many of the following essays seek to make clear, however, these two ideas are not mutually exclusive. The case studies comprising this collection show how differently styled interactive encounters between individuals and objects and/or artists can lay the foundation for collective art experiences in a range of spaces. These include, for example, individual interactive experiences that take place in a group setting but that alter the outcome of the work, the observation of interactive exchanges undertaken by others prior to one’s own participation, or actions undertaken by an individual that have the effect of altering the look or display of an artwork and, hence, the way in which it is experienced by others. In all of these cases, interactivity informs the way in which the artwork is experienced and appreciated at the level of both the individual and the wider audience. The term ‘interactivity’ is also used in this book to distinguish participatory artworks from those that are produced ‘collaboratively’. Grant Kester analyses various styles, histories, and contexts of collaborative art in The One and the Many, noting that this style of art places emphasis on practices of joint creation (both as between artist and the public and as between members of the public themselves).21 While the incorporation of participatory practices into artworks can be understood as connoting an act of ‘collaboration’ between artist and audience in a general sense, contributions to this volume stress the importance of identifying the underlying idea, script, or form of the artwork as the product of the artist’s own creativity.22 Although active exchanges between artist, audience, and artwork may change the look or trajectory of the work in prescribed or unexpected ways, essays in this volume draw attention to the structures that artists build into their works for the purposes of directing the range of interactive responses solicited from members of

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an audience. In this regard, interactivity can, but need not, trouble the idea of single authorship of a work of art. In his Notes on Participatory Art, Gustaf Almenberg suggests that this style of artwork shifts the focus away from both the spectator and the object, and instead privileges the ‘act of creating’: ‘Participatory Art is “the beholder in action” using personal choice and intuition as primary tools.’23 There is a sense in which this notion of ‘creativity’ is not distinctive of participatory works, but can be understood as an extension of the experience of art more generally. Kendall Walton has argued, for example, that a mimetic painting can be understood as a prop in a game of make-believe, in so far as the work invites us to imagine its representational content as if it were actually before us.24 In Walton’s account, representational artworks are akin to props such as dolls or toy trucks on the grounds that they ‘prescribe imaginings’ and permit us to play games in fictional worlds.25 They also generate moments of self-reflection by offering us the possibility of inhabiting a particular role within, or adopting a novel viewpoint on, that world.26 There is a sense in which this act of imaginative game-playing implies a certain ‘beholder in action’, namely, a person who is willing to use the visual prop for specific imaginative ends. Yet participatory artworks may be said to extend this logic by serving as props that permit more elaborate games with multiple participants. The ‘act of creating’ that Almenberg identifies as the focus of such works may not only affect the look of the work (thereby distinguishing it from, say, a painting), but typically exploits the participant’s own psychology and physical presence in the games of make-believe permitted by its rules.27 Taking up Walton’s point, the participant performs a range of actions (some real and some imagined) that are ‘authorized’ by the script of the work. For Walton, the type of imagining prompted by such engagement with fictional worlds can, as a general matter, lead to a form of critical self-awareness: It is chiefly by imagining ourselves facing certain situations, engaging in certain activities, observing certain events, experiencing or expressing certain feelings or attitudes that we come to terms with our feelings – that we discover them, learn to accept them, purge ourselves of them, or whatever exactly it is that imagining helps us do. These self-imaginings

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In Walton’s account, this kind of self-imagining can be generated by an individual’s engagement with fictional worlds created in media such as painting or literary narrative.29 Participatory artworks can, however, amplify the effect of an individual’s self-placement in a fictional world by making tangible the sensory, emotional, and ethical effects of encounters within that world, or by displaying the outcomes of a participant’s action or inaction in response to a particular set of circumstances. In this regard, participatory art demands much of the imaginative work asked of art audiences generally. However, by making strategies of self-imagining central to their aesthetic effect and by allowing individuals to experience the consequences of their own ‘choices and intuitions’ in determining the instantiation of the work, participatory works can have the effect of confronting audience members with startling and direct forms of self-knowledge.30 As some of the essays in this volume make clear, the onus on the participant to acknowledge his or her contribution to the outcome of participatory artworks generates many of the tensions involved in the realization of such projects. This book is divided into four sections that examine, in turn, various social, imaginative, performance, and institutional facets of interactive contemporary art. The essays comprising Part I, ‘Encountering Strangers’, tackle debates about the impact of participation strategies on interpersonal relations within and beyond the boundaries of the art gallery or museum. In each chapter, strategies of ‘interactivity’ are designed to elicit a form of self-imagining of the kind discussed above, while also highlighting the importance of this act in the creation of social relations beyond the parameters of the artwork itself. Mieke Bal begins by discussing the video installation she made with British artist, Michelle Williams Gamaker, entitled Psychoanalysis on Trial (2011). Her chapter shows how, through specific acts of storytelling, methods of installation, and montage techniques, the installation invited viewers to determine their own trajectory through images, music, and dialogue while also ‘holding’ them in the presence of real and imaginary others.31 Bal identifies interactivity as crucial to the

INTRODUCTION

are important even when our main objective is to gain insight into others.28

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aesthetic and affective resonance of the work. In this instance, however, interactivity is understood not only as a relationship between artwork and audience, but also as the manifestation of bonds between images and the cultural context in which they are embedded. In my own contribution to this volume, I turn to the medium of computer art and examine its ability to function as both an individual interactive practice and a collective experience. Focusing on large-scale works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (described by the artist as pieces of ‘relational architecture’), I analyze ways in which digitally mediated public art can both thematize and facilitate cosmopolitan exchange in contemporary cities. Nicola Grobler concludes this section with a discussion of her artwork, Small Victories (2007 and 2009), and of a curatorial project undertaken by Lerato Bereng entitled Thank You Driver (2009). Grobler’s exploration of intersections between art and the everyday in South Africa demonstrates the importance of attending to the specific political and cultural context in which the works are embedded. Designed to take advantage of the local geography of Cape Town and mediated in different languages (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa), the projects undertaken by both Grobler and Bereng seek to address specific tensions concerning the way in which public space is experienced in post-apartheid South Africa. Section II, entitled ‘Imaginary Geographies’, explores ways in which interactive artworks shape real and virtual environments. Illustrating the importance of attending to the specific site in which participatory works are staged, Joel Robinson examines ways in which art can be used to ‘remap’ familiar geographies, and in the process generate new ‘social landscapes’. Focusing on works produced by two artists based in the United Kingdom, Robinson traces the journeys of individuals and even land masses themselves in projects that interface with the histories of the Situationist d´erive and of Land Art. Arguably instances of the most ‘collaborative’ style of work discussed in this volume, Andrew K¨otting’s Gallivant (1995) and Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland (2012) are examined by Robinson as ‘happenings’ that deliberately undermine the genre of Western landscape painting and instead privilege the methods by which contrasting beliefs, customs, and values can constitute an experience of place. The term ‘site’ need not, however, refer to a physical space, but can also encompass an imaginary terrain. Illustrating this point, Chapters 5

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INTRODUCTION

and 6 examine interactive encounters between artist and audience that generate differently styled imaginary journeys. Josh Ginsburg demonstrates his artwork, Walkabout, in Chapter 5. Using a spatial metaphor to express the creation of, and encounters with, a digital archive of images, Ginsburg shows how an interactive exchange between artist and audience can transform private thought processes into public acts of communication. The associative logic that structures routes through this database contributes to an infinitely variable form of ‘conversation’ in which the artist responds to his interlocutors through digitally projected images, video, text, sound, and language. The theme of using interactivity to explore mental spaces also comes to the fore in Claudia Slanar’s interview with artist Warren Neidich, in Chapter 6. Slanar discusses the different types of interactivity solicited by Neidich’s works, and shows how they reveal both the imaginative universe of the individual and specific socio-political developments that characterize an era of ‘cognitive capitalism’. The interview draws out ways in which Neidich’s research-based art practice seeks to elicit neurological responses designed to emancipate individuals from coercive patterns and associations that structure the social, cultural, and economic landscape in which those individuals live and work. Recent discussions of participatory art have noted various overlaps that this style of art-production shares with histories of performance.32 In Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop focuses on three specific case studies that, in her view, help to illuminate the rise of participatory practices – namely, Italian Futurism, Proletkult theatre, and Paris Dada. For Bishop the socio-political embedding of performance works produced under the banners of these movements and their emphasis on audience engagement suggest that ‘the pre-history of recent developments in contemporary art lies in the domain of theatre and performance rather than in histories of painting or the ready-made’.33 In contrast to this view, I argued above that participatory art extends the type of selfimagining that occurs in aesthetic experience more generally and that, as a result, it need not be understood as being indebted to one particular artistic tradition. In making this claim, I do not mean to suggest that recent participatory artworks have no connection to performance, but rather to encourage critical focus on ways in which such works interface with a broader range of media. Developing this idea, Section III, entitled ‘Performance and Agency’, focuses on performance artworks

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that throw into relief moments of self-directed imagining on the part of the audience. Illustrating various implications of the audience-turned-performer role described by Gaut, Susan Jarosi analyzes Marina Abramovi´c’s, The Artist is Present, a work staged at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. Jarosi examines instances of crying in this work (by both Abramovi´c and numerous participants), and shows how the audience is ‘performance making’ in a way that challenges many theoretical approaches to performance and body art. Jarosi also explores the extension of this performance into different media (including film, photography, and social media) and demonstrates how these wider ramifications of the work contribute to the agency of audience members in constructing the meaning of the work and comprehending their role in its execution. Chapters 8 and 9 turn to specific ethical issues that arise in the context of interactive performance. Harry Weeks’s discussion of works by Shlomi Yaffe and Kristina Norman pays particular attention to the shifting roles assumed by artists in performances staged in public spaces. Weeks examines the antagonisms that can arise when members of the public are unwittingly drawn into these performances, and contrasts the ethical repercussions of these artworks with projects undertaken in the field of ‘tactical media’. In Chapter 9, Jennifer Kalionis develops the theme of antagonism in her analysis of performance works by Australian artist Mike Parr. According to Kalionis, the artist uses the medium of interactive performance as a type of ‘behaviour modification’ that is designed to awaken political responsibility among individuals who have, according to the artist, neglected their critical responsibilities as members of the public sphere. In her examination of this ethical awakening, however, Kalionis points out key discrepancies between experiments in the social sciences that involve human subjects and the execution of participatory artworks. While the former are subject to guidelines designed to protect participants, artworks may entrap, exploit, or even abuse individuals in a way that can damage the trust between the artist and his or her audience. In his book, On the Museum’s Ruins, Douglas Crimp confronts some of the contradictions inherent in art’s relation to its institutional frameworks and examines challenges that have been faced by members of the avant-garde who, through their art, have sought to change

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INTRODUCTION

the social practices within which those frameworks are embedded.34 Crimp considers the claim (debated by Peter B¨urger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde) that, viewed as part of a historical project, the avantgarde failed to integrate art into the social practices of everyday life; in the absence of a broader social transformation, art is continually ‘coopted’ by its institutional setting, and its promises to effect change are ‘neutralized’.35 Crimp notes, however, that such a view understands art to be inherently limited and ‘merely reflective, not productive of social relations’.36 This leads him to acknowledge the existence of ongoing (perhaps ineradicable) tensions between socially directed artworks and their conduits of display and communication to audiences. Crimp’s analysis, including the critical self-questioning it involves, is particularly relevant to a consideration of participatory art forms in light of the socially directed impetus of many works produced in this style. Taking up this point, the final section of this book, ‘Institutional Frameworks’, addresses issues that arise in the marketing and installation of interactive contemporary art. In Chapter 10, Juliet Steyn debates the types of ‘experience’ currently being promoted by curators, and considers how participatory strategies influence the expectations and assumptions of museum visitors who are invited to ‘buy’ such experience. Focusing on works by Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Steyn also examines how artworks are assimilated into current trends that give primacy to audience participation. As a foil to the commodification of ‘experience’ in contemporary artworlds, Steyn proposes a reading of Susan Trangmar’s, La Chambre Claire (1997), a work that invokes both contemplation and interactivity without privileging either. Chapter 11 complements the discussion of the preceding chapter by bringing a curatorial perspective to bear on the subject of interactive museum experience. Margriet Schavemaker discusses various strategies undertaken in the fields of public programming and education that are designed to enhance audience participation and locates these discussions against four contrasting curatorial models. She analyzes recent self-critical discourses that have developed in connection with museum practices, asserting the need for an ‘expanded institutional criticism’ that would foster a more open debate about the political motivations that have informed the rise of participatory practices. The book concludes with a contribution by Freee Art Collective, a group of UK-based artists comprising Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt,

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and Mel Jordan. Chapter 12 sets out Freee’s critique of the rise of participation in art since the 1990s – a development that sees artists and curators searching continually for new and increased levels of audience inclusion. While there has been much discussion about what might be gained by participating in an artwork, Freee asks what might be lost by this act. Taking up Crimp’s point mentioned above, Freee also questions the extent to which participation is a useful social or aesthetic strategy in circumstances where it remains bound by the institutional structures of the artworld. For this reason, Freee’s work is an attempt to transform the broader ‘apparatus of art’ and to create works in which the roles assigned to individuals and groups remain fluid and subject to continuous negotiation. As a means of resisting absorption into the institutional structures of the artworld, Freee privileges a form of participation that remains immanent in the work, but that never crystallizes into a single or definable role. It is, perhaps, a fitting end to the discussions of the present volume that the most interesting and valuable form of participation envisaged by Freee is one that must remain impossible.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

12

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les Presses du r´eel, 2009). Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., pp. 9, 16–7. Ibid., p. 8. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October (Fall, 2004), pp. 51–79. Ibid., 65. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomorrow Is Another Day, K¨olnischer Kunstverein (1996–7). Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, pp. 64–5, 67–9. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 104–7.

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12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29

Kester, Conversation Pieces, 107; Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 9. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London/New York: Verso, 2012), p. 39. See also Bishop’s call to develop ‘a more nuanced (and honest) critical vocabulary with which to address the vicissitudes of collaborative authorship and spectatorship’ (Artificial Hells, p. 8). T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic 1848–1851 (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 14– 5. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, p. 67. Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 36. Ibid., p. 39. Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 143. Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 13. Ibid., pp. 1–2. Kester, The One and the Many, pp. 1–3. See also Lopes on the distinction between the artist and the computer art user: ‘I [the user] may intend to generate a display of the work through my actions; but the work isn’t the same as its display and an intention to generate a display isn’t an intention to make the work’. Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art, p. 75. Gustaf Almenberg, Notes on Participatory Art: Toward a Manifesto Differentiating it from Open Work, Interactive Art and Relational Art (Milton Keynes: Author House, 2010), p. 5. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 53. Ibid., p. 51. Kendall Walton, Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 72. Almenberg also links this to the notion of play, and refers to D.W. Winnicott’s discussions of play in psychology. Almenberg, Notes on Participatory Art, p. 5. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 34. I have explored the potential of this strategy in works by Edgar Degas in Kathryn Brown, ‘The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s Bathers’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68: 4 (Fall, 2010), pp. 331–41.

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30

31 32

33 34

35

36

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Richard Moran provides significant insight into the forms of selfreflection that may be generated by imaginative responses to artworks in ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination’, Philosophical Review, 103: 1 ( January 1994), pp. 75–106. ‘Hypothetical reasoning involves seeing what would follow from the truth of some proposition. It does not involve either feigning belief in that proposition or determining what would follow from the fact of one’s believing it. . . . By contrast, imagination with respect to emotional attitudes may require such things as dramatic rehearsal, the right mood, the right experiences, a sympathetic nature. It thus says more about a person that he is either able or unable to imagine in this way, and he bears a different responsibility for it.’ (p. 105). This description is intended to be distinct from the specific medium of interactive digital cinema or gaming. These overlaps come to the fore in Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York/London: Routledge, 2011). Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 41. Douglas Crimp, ‘Photographs at the End of Modernism’, in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 2–42, at pp. 20–1. Peter B¨urger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Crimp, ‘Photographs at the End of Modernism’, p. 20. Crimp, ‘Photographs at the End of Modernism’, p. 21.

1 Moving Images, Two-Way Mieke Bal

Interactivity is much more than allowing visitors to touch buttons and change the display on a screen. The relative lack of definition of the term is helpful for creative thinking – here, about the function of art in society. While I am eager to argue for art’s social potential, I share both Grant Kester’s commitment to making art matter for communities and Claire Bishop’s scepticism concerning the feasibility of achieving such effects. More is needed than goodwill and broad terms to point to where that potential for interactivity lies. To call socially relevant art ‘relational’, for example, seems hardly sufficient to distinguish particular kinds of art or their effects from art in general.1 Art is not only an aesthetic and potentially critical intervention, or a domain that facilitates a concrete form of contact between the thinker, maker, and debater (the artist) and a variety of people who choose to take time to contemplate things that are not useful otherwise. It is also, or manifests itself also as, a visible ‘thing’, an object made, subject to technology. I propose to consider the interactivity of art as the connection of these two aspects. As both a critic and an artist, I seek to explore possibilities where the technological and artistic requirements of engagement with art join forces. Together they are metaphors for, as well as enforcements of, such engagements. To explore how the two can join forces, I look back at one of the exhibition projects in which I have recently presented my video 17

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work. The one under scrutiny here, Landscapes of Madness (2011– 2), is based on fiction. It concerns madness and folly, and aims to create spaces where visitors can encounter, enjoy, and communicate with these forms of strangeness, consider their historicity, and decide whether or not to engage with people hitherto excluded from social communication and bonding.2 After working on experimental documentaries about issues of migration for several years, British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker and I made the feature film A Long History of Madness (2011). This film concerns something that is, in fact, very ‘popular’ – not cherished by many, but known and encountered by nearly all of us. It is ‘about’ madness, but it also stages, performs, enacts, and interrogates ideas about madness and its cultural history. The frequent occurrence of madness in everyday culture, its long historical lineage, and the need to be delicate in taking the subject on at all make it a challenging but also gripping subject – one that nearly imposes an interactive approach. To enrich further the audience’s experience of the complexity of madness, we turned the footage of our film into a series of video installation works, which we then brought together to form an exhibition. We expected that an exhibition of what have been termed ‘gallery films’ would tend to be more interactive than a ‘theatre film’. Landscapes of Madness consists of 16 video installations through which the idea of ‘madness’ is given a variety of interpretations. Unlike theatre films, the installations place the visitor – their ‘second person’ – in charge of making the stories. As there is no prescribed itinerary through the space, participants are invited to follow their own itinerary and to create their own combination of stories, portraits, props, and scenes on view.3 To put the narrative content very succinctly, the elements stage a confrontation between late medieval fools, members of political street theatre groups, and the contemporary ‘mad’. The encounter is more than an anachronism; it is also a spatial challenge to our logic. This challenge – the incipient interactivity – becomes concrete in the exhibition space, where semi-darkness and moments of sound leaking potentially confuse, and thus activate the visitors’ process of engagement. The temporal narrative of film is spatialized; visitors compose their own narratives by choosing itineraries and pace. The patients in the exhibition pieces unravel their life stories so as to

MOVING IMAGES, TWO-WAY Figure 1.1 Psychoanalysis on Trial by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: the analyst and the public. Photo: Jari Nieminen, courtesy of Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland.

entice visitors to spend the time necessary to experience the encounter effectively. In this sense, the meeting of institution, space, works, and visitors is a first level on which technology and aesthetics meet to produce interactivity. This exhibition experimented with ways of transforming the visitor’s experience of art in its relation to society. Rather than depicting social situations, the show creates them in order to enable consideration, contemplation, and confrontation. Here, I focus primarily on one installation in particular that experimented with something like ‘interactivity enforcement’. It is entitled Psychoanalysis on Trial and consists of two large projections on opposing walls, with chairs in the middle (Fig. 1.1). It presents the enforced, anachronistic (mock) trial of a psychoanalyst accused of contributing to the erasure of gestural language from social life. On one side is the analyst and a motley crowd of onlookers; on the other side we see a court consisting of medieval fools and latter-day thinkers. The dialogues are both serious and hilarious, the characters both admirable and foolish, if not outright ‘mad’. This installation is part of the exhibition Landscapes of Madness, and has also been mounted as a single installation.4 19

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Lateral Montage One of the reasons we turned from documentary to fiction is the issue of voyeurism and exploitation. Documenting patients necessarily requires informed consent, whereas such consent can hardly be certifiably informed in the case of psychiatrically framed individuals. Moreover, it is questionable whether madness can be made visible, let alone understood by ‘simply’ recording it. Other strategies were called for to make madness visible and understandable, but also, to a degree, ‘contagious’. A Long History of Madness is based on the 1998 book M`ere Folle by French psychoanalyst Franc¸oise Davoine, but deviates from its source in respects that have to do with the endeavour of imaging, of making madness visible through the imagination. It stages the question and practice of the psychoanalytic treatment of people diagnosed as ‘psychotic’; for the sake of avoiding diagnostic discourse, I will simply call them ‘mad’. The project is a theoretical fiction, a blend of theory and art where art ‘theorizes’ (audio)visually, and where, by experimenting, fiction enables an understanding of issues that theory itself cannot manage. Meaning is not offered to the audience simply to be consumed, but is created by and within each viewer. The film is very visual, very fictional, and quite ‘mad’. Partly this is due to our loyalty to madness; moreover, as the analyst explains when she enters the theatre where she is put on trial, madness is a temporal confusion. For this reason, chronology is tenuous; transitions are made by means of overlapping images or other forms of association and do not conform to a linear storyline. This requires viewers to go along with an unusual mode of storytelling, and is thus a compelling way of integrating interactivity. The anti-structural format is steeped in our aim of staging installations; it was an installation project as much as a cinematic one. To understand how this merging of genres is possible, and to understand the specific interactivity of our installation Psychoanalysis on Trial, I seek to address the question of that merging: What happens when a film (a time-bound performance one watches on a single screen in a dark theatre) is transformed into an exhibition? From the start we intended our film to become a range of parallel works, all experiments in visualization. Psychoanalysis on Trial is the dreamy, or fantasized, consequence of a real and tragic event in the life

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of Franc¸oise, the analyst central to the project. Unexpectedly, one of her young psychotic patients dies. This drives the analyst herself to the edge of madness, and the result is an historically thick, disordered, and confusing process of guilt and redemption.5 The transformation from theatre film to gallery film entails important differences, some of which can be considered in terms of ‘spatializing film’. The primary feature of film installation is the concrete and material space in which it is presented, in which the images move and the viewer can move. Such films, however, are not merely films made for exhibition in spaces designated for art audiences – they are not opposed to theatre films, which are supposedly made for larger audiences. More fundamentally, gallery films use cinematic techniques and aesthetics to displace the primary feature of cinema – its temporality – and to turn it into a spatial feature. This proposition evokes not only the spatial arrangement of the gallery, but also the multiple implications of the concept of montage itself. In the gallery, space is the context, or environment – or, in the terminology of my view of affect, the medium – within which the film develops its specific effects.6 Montage is, indeed, a spatial form: the juxtaposition of fragments that together form a new whole, but between which gaps remain. Moreover, in multiple-screen installations, the montage between clips is overdetermined by a montage between screens. Whereas the former montage is frequently made invisible by ‘seamless’ edits, the latter is meant to be seen. The same holds for the juxtaposition and sequential succession of video pieces in an exhibition. It is necessary to make astute use of the potential of this double montage for a film-based exhibition to be interactively effective. The exhibition situation allows the curator to develop a lateral montage. This lateral montage, it turns out, produces a foregrounded ‘installation-ness’. Lateral montage can be compared to a sideways glance, encompassing more than a single vision. Since it activates the viewers and changes their bodily behaviour, this is another interactivity-enhancing feature (Fig. 1.2). Time and space are inseparable; they are two dimensions of the same ‘thing’ – movement. In our experiment, we sought to maximize this potential of lateral montage to ‘work on’ viewers. The title of the exhibition, Landscapes of Madness, alludes to spatiality. Psychoanalysis on Trial is the central piece in that larger exhibition. In that work, as in

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INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 1.2 Psychoanalysis on Trial, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: the court; on the left: Striking the Right Chord, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011. Photo: Jari Nieminen, courtesy of Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland.

the exhibition, we staged forms of madness that are deeply affecting, hilariously funny, and unexpected sources of wisdom. Thus we aimed to integrate aspects of affect, humour, and knowledge. The pieces have in common that they stage the social nature of madness. This social dimension appears both in the violent assaults on subjects that generate madness as a defence mechanism, and in the equally violent refusal of others to engage with mad people on an equal footing. It is to these forms of violence that our project tries to offer an alternative. The institutional, physical, and technical aspects of the dual-screen installation embed visitors inside the dilemmas of madness and its history, and thus move the work beyond representation. The loose itinerary might qualify as lateral montage. In this respect, it constitutes a space-time not unlike that of madness itself. Or, to reverse this simile: madness can help us understand the complexities of culture in general. It remains to be seen whether and how the installation compels such understanding by skirting madness. Madness generates a number of cultural modes, producing knowledge that includes affective transmission. The loci of affect in the 22

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film – the points from where it emanates – are, on the one hand, the analyst torn by guilt but unjustly accused of the ills of her profession, and, on the other hand, the members of the court who each talk about or show their historic wounds. This dual and literally two-sided affective binding prohibits both easy position-taking and indifference. Visitors encounter forms of madness, some tragic, some humorous; some play-acted and some ‘really mad’. This combination raises – and stages – questions concerning cinema and theatre, with the different styles of acting that these distinct media require. It raises questions of cultural history, where ‘madness’ cannot be construed as a transcultural constant. Most fundamentally, in view of an understanding of the political potential of this cultural embedding, it raises the questions: Are they mad? Do they play the fool? Or am I too rigid to allow them to be sane? And what does the answer to that question say about me? The technical aspects of the installation combine to make these questions compelling. Visitors are free to choose where they want to go, what to watch, and when to listen. If the work is to be interactive, however, this cannot be a free-floating liberty. Pace challenges the usual format of exhibition, and the exhibition of the moving image in particular. The characters staged – some ‘mad’, some ‘fools’, some ‘normal’ – must hold visitors. This need underlies the technical form of two opposing screens and the division of affective energy between the two sides. This verb ‘holding’ resonates with the psychoanalytic term holding environment. This is what parents must offer their infants; but here the holding is, ideally, mutual. Allowing oneself to feel comfortable with – to be ‘held’ by – mad people makes it possible, in turn, to hold them: to refrain from projecting estrangement, and instead to identify with them. In this way, one can experience what it is like to have different limits, hear more voices, and see what ‘normally’ cannot be seen.

Aesthetic Considerations Before I can explore the social potential of Psychoanalysis on Trial any further, I need to address objections to the claim that art can be made socially relevant. These include objections coming from the Kantian tradition, that aesthetic experience must remain outside social and political interests; or the objection that there is no direct relationship 23

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between artistic form and meaning. Instead of denying the limitations of intrinsically aesthetic framing, I see the aesthetic as the starting point for the social potential. But the objectors are right: this does not happen automatically. ‘Learning from madness’, for instance, possesses several aesthetic features, and on the whole, in the setting of a museum or an art gallery, presupposes an aesthetic framing. What can that mean, when the primary subject is something usually subjected to isolation and contempt? First of all, on the question of form: between time and space stands sculpture – an art form that is spatial in that it takes up space. In the type of sculpturality that Psychoanalysis on Trial proposes, this entails a three-dimensional presentation (rather than a re-presentation) that visitors can engage with bodily, in space. Given the work’s allegiance to art, it is also premised on something uneasily called ‘beauty’ in the encounter with madness. Similarly, the art context of the work allows freedom from scholarly constraints, so that, for example, the medieval fools are not represented as ‘historically correct’, but as people whose temporality clashes with our time. Instead of offering beauty as aesthetic enjoyment for its own sake, then, beauty is deployed as a weapon, as a tool to embody the proposition that madness not only is a normal part of social life, but also has enjoyable things to offer. To ‘touch’ viewers with that possibility – to compel them to let the contagion happen – a space conducive to fictionalization is a more effective tool than documentary or scholarly representation. Instead of understanding aesthetics in a traditional, elitist sense, I understand it as a sensorial engagement in public space, and thus as an indispensable complement to, or even integral element of, the political. Various production aspects of the work are designed to increase audience engagement. The videos are the result of a form of intense group acting, with only a few professional actors. Actors had relatively free rein with the script, and sometimes this yielded exceptionally powerful moments.7 Perhaps paradoxically, the circumscription of the experience within the field of art spaces allows the overcoming of other boundaries. Avoiding moralizing and political propaganda, the goal of this project is to make it attractive for visitors to overcome ‘the last frontier’: the difficulty of having social relations with people considered mad.

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The artistic experience of the encounters is offered in order to help overcome this most tenacious boundary in the social domain. In this respect, the work is a natural continuation of our long-term project of documenting what I call ‘migratory culture’, which was the central element in the exhibition Towards the Other. This is not the culture of migrants, but the culture we share with migrants – a culture in which migration is generalized and must, like madness, be considered normal. Abolishing the last frontier, then, is the larger social goal to which our project seeks to contribute. But this does not make it either interactive by definition, or socially effective.8 As in the other installation pieces, our strategy was to pluralize madness – to show it in so many ways that it becomes impossible to cast it out of our social orbit. Anyone will recognize some form of it, and recognition entails commitment. The subject is introduced in three related ways: historically, geographically, and personally. None of these offers direct access or allows distancing. In Psychoanalysis on Trial, we deployed the very simple form of the dual-screen projection to present forms of madness and folly in the historical form of the Theatre of Folly. Precisely because the political theatre of the sotties was a popular practice, the historical manifestations of madness in the medieval theatre of fools cannot be fully accessed; the written documents are scarce and unreliable. It was literally a tradition. Hence, we do not create an historically correct image, but by refraining from doing so, we are loyal to the historical tradition (Fig. 1.3).9 Technically, in addition to the general factors mentioned above – spatiotemporal freedom and lateral montage – sound is the primary tool for achieving interactivity. The two frontally opposing screens of Psychoanalysis on Trial are installed at ground level, so as to yield images on a human scale and height. During the 12-minute trial, medieval fools and ‘mad geniuses’ from more recent history contest the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and indict Franc¸oise, its practitioner, for participating in the destruction of, especially, gestural traditions through which social bonds were forged. The primary medium through which the polemical encounters between the fools, the mad, and the psychoanalyst are staged is sound, in a competition between noise and music. The importance of sound that this competition entails is a self-reflective element of the cinematic as audio-visual medium. Noise belongs to the fools and the mad; music is meant to calm them

25

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 1.3 Psychoanalysis on Trial, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: three medieval fools and, on the right, Antonin Artaud as members of the court. Photo: Jari Nieminen, courtesy of Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova, Turku, Finland.

down with a structural version of their own sounds. In the installation it becomes obvious that sound is also a spatial issue; it comes from somewhere, and can be heard only in specific places. In Psychoanalysis on Trial, sound is used in line with the idea of a trial. Except for one moment of utter confusion when it comes from both sides, the sound comes from one side only, where the spoken word is uttered. Speakers are installed close to the two walls. Sound becomes central for this piece to achieve something beyond visual pleasure – something that can become a social effect. It is of central importance that visitors experience the diverse provenance of the sound. In order to achieve this, we put four seats exactly in the middle, with two seats facing each screen. Thus, the space offered to visitors is not self-evident or smooth. Voices come now from the front, then from the back of where one sits. Meanwhile, one is constantly aware that there are images behind one’s back. As a result, a physical restlessness is the only option. Even if one manages to sit at exactly the same distance from every sound source in the room, there is still the need to turn one’s head to follow the voices. Sound becomes directive, but remains impossible to encompass. This becomes more striking as the subtitles are identical on both screens. One does not need sound 26

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to understand what is being said, but rather to be in the space with the fools and the mad, to participate in the fictional trial and the real questions it relentlessly poses. As I have said, the trial scene is so central because the death of one of her patients has triggered in Franc¸oise an immense feeling of guilt, leading her into a deep professional crisis. In her dreams or fantasies, she has a posthumous encounter with a patient, Ariste, who has died of an overdose. Was it an accident or a suicide? And who is responsible for this horror? Importantly, neither of these two questions can be answered; nor can they ever be forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant. In the exhibition space, the Psychoanalysis on Trial gallery was adjacent to a gallery devoted to Ariste’s ghost. His memory incites some to feelings of guilt, others to revolt or identification; they ask the establishment critical questions. Some evoke – in their madness, or in their wild wisdom? – the wars that have plagued Ariste’s family. But with his unexpected wisdom the dead man also stands in the tradition of Folly. Angrily, the young man looks at us all from beyond the grave. Largely because of his ghostly presence throughout the project, red is a predominant colour – the red of violence, death, and passion. In the film, the death of this man sets the analyst on a course of travel, search, and education – a picaresque form of a Bildungsroman. In the exhibition, the juxtaposition of the Ariste gallery with the next, where Psychoanalysis on Trial was staged, foregrounded the different forms of questioning binary oppositions: right and wrong, good and bad treatment, socially productive and sterile relationships, life and death. This is the stake of the entire project, and culminates in the Psychoanalysis on Trial installation. Here, the sculptural form itself, especially the sound installation, technologically overdetermines that questioning. I submit that this is where the interactivity emerges. The installation stages a number of characters with different, but always multiple historical lineages. A number of fools, in this scene, enact both the medieval characters of the mock trials of the sotties and other figures from the cultural history of madness. Acting out the sibling rivalry we all know so well, one of them even recalls the master fool Don Quixote. The shadow of Cervantes’s character raises yet another question of cultural history – namely that of genres and their bond with moods. While Don Quixote may well be considered mad, even clinically, and his author was certifiably traumatized, the

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keen, sometimes painful integration of the tragic and the humorous in this figure and his sidekick liberates different moods in theatrical production, and allows an affective encounter that both gives visitors the creeps and helps them fully to engage the sensorial space where laughter can merge with grief. The other – the sibling, rival, servant, or sidekick – at moments gives a brilliant caricature of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose own psychotic state did not prevent him from revolutionizing psychoanalysis. In Psychoanalysis on Trial, this caricature becomes chronologically challenged, or ‘preposterously’ anachronistic, as the medieval fool enacting the Lacan impersonation (standing in the middle in Figure 1.3) does so reciting verses from twelfth-century poetry.10 Distinguishing this installation from the other works in the exhibition to which it is also related, I would suggest that the interaction between work and viewer is activated by the way in which the viewers are made to experience sound while they see and recall the implications of the historical figures. It was obvious, during the time I was observing visitors’ behaviour, that the interface between sight and sound posed a challenge. For example, where the room allowed it, people tended to pick up the chairs and put them at the side of the room, so as to be better able to see the screen where the sound came from. And whereas physical likeness to historical characters had not been pursued, the fact that they spoke lines quoted verbatim from well-known works of philosophy and literature, or imitated the voices of their models very precisely, made it difficult to dismiss them as ‘just fiction’.11 If we consider the Baumgartian conception of aesthetics, this situation would qualify quite precisely. Psychoanalysis on Trial does not simply appeal to the senses; it all but enforces a sensory engagement. Moreover, the staging of sound in such a way that its physical properties and spatial positioning directly impact on visitors’ bodies, while also gluing the sound to visible figures and their gestures, mimes, and movements, is more likely conducive to a concrete, modified social behaviour than any representation. Through strong contact with the figures and what they say and stand for, a response solely geared to the enjoyment of beauty is discouraged. Beauty – of the images, the colours, the music, and the poetry – is enlisted on behalf of the social effect of not only tolerating madness, but also actively enjoying its company.

Another aspect of interactivity emerges from the bond between the video work and its cultural embedding. I am referring specifically to the way in which the work draws upon more traditional forms of imaging. The allusions to genres, figures, and situations from both canonical and popular history challenge the status of the images themselves in their cultural habitat. The diversification of forms of madness thus entails a probing of the status of images, and the possibility of recognizing as well as encountering novelty in the confrontations the installation stages. To understand the character of M`ere Folle, president of the court and leader of the fools, a brief discussion is in order of the images, in a preposterously historical perspective. In a film based on a previously published book, one expects the images to be derived from the book’s descriptions. Film buffs know this is rarely the case. Images of the film are not ‘after-images’ in this sense. They are ‘inter-images’, or, in semiotic terms, ‘interpretants’ – a product of the visitors’ imaginative reshaping that is, strictly speaking, also a spatialization. The spatial nature of these interpretants emerges from their anthropomorphism and their staging – the endeavour to stage encounters with them. They come towards the viewer, proposing ideas in concrete form.12 Except for the cover image, a detail from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Dulle Griet (Mad Meg, 1562), representing women driven mad by war, there were no images in the material sense in the book on which we based our cinematic works. I use the term interpretant in the sense in which American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce theorized the sign; accordingly, images can be signs even if they are not materially extant. Peirce begins his definition of the sign with a perceptible object. The question posed by this object – What does it mean? – cannot be answered by revealing something inherent in the object. Instead, the cultural group in which the object circulates develops the meaning in a practice that yields a second, further-elaborated object. That second object, or sign, is the interpretant, a new sign developed on the basis of, and evoked by, the attempt to understand the first sign. As objects, images are active participants in cultural analysis, in that they enable and indeed require reflection and speculation. They can contradict projections and wrong-headed interpretations, and thus

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Giving Images a Past, an Intellect, and Power

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constitute a theoretical object with philosophical relevance, whether materially embodied or not. Hence, the reflection ‘from within’, as a maker, on how these processes work takes place within a larger cultural context.13 The fact that Brueghel has depicted the figure of the woman driven mad by war does not singularize that figure as emerging from a single source. Well selected for the book’s cover, however, she does stimulate the formation of interpretants by those who read the book. We needed to produce a figure derived from this fifteenth-century emblem of the relationship between violence and madness. Although the figure emerges from a certain historical tradition, such traditions are never ‘pure’ and homogeneous. Our figure has at least three possible genealogies: 1. She is the leader of the late medieval political theatre of the sotties. That theatre frequently took the form of a mock trial, in which political abuse was exposed. Here lies the historical relevance of the form of our piece as a trial. (In this function we see her to the left in Figure 1.3.) 2. She is inspired, secondly, by the speaker of Desiderius Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, a text in which the personification of Folly speaks in the first person, as announced in the genre indication: ‘An Oration, of feigned matter, spoken by Folly in her own person.’ 3. When she has become mad by the violence of war, she shows up as Brueghel’s Mad Meg. This triple origin made the figure complexly bound to play-acting, to a first-person voice and a second-person address, and to violenceinduced madness. We were sensitized to the importance of her voice and address by words like these, from the beginning of Erasmus’s text: But if you ask me why I appear before you in this strange dress, be pleased to lend me your ears, and I’ll tell you; not those ears, I mean, you carry to church, but abroad with you, such as you are wont to prick up to jugglers, fools, and buffoons . . . 14

Erasmus here stresses the importance of hearing; address and listening appear as the essence of sociality. This resurfaces in our emphasis on 30

MOVING IMAGES, TWO-WAY Figure 1.4 Psychoanalysis on Trial, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2011: the public of fools, cheering and laughing when the analyst is being accused. Video still.

sound. The two factors of madness and voice, it appears, go together in their attempts to break through the boundaries of a narrow ‘reason’, addressing an appeal to openness to the ‘second person’, while searching for wisdom and knowledge in unorthodox ways. In the exhibition, address became a key to the disposition of the works in relation to our hope to solicit visitors’ engagement. In Psychoanalysis on Trial, address becomes the single linguistic form, but the object of that address varies. This brings folly close to psychoanalysis. At the heart of both the exhibition and the film is psychoanalysis itself, incarnated by the woman who feels guilty for Ariste’s death, yet refuses the generalizations about psychoanalysis, as well as judgment itself. In the most sophisticated entanglement with her historical model, the sottie, Davoine has conceived a trial at the heart of her book. The form of a trial, then, overdetermines the trial as such, as language game and power game – judgment becomes the exercise of power (Fig. 1.4). The analyst is herself put on trial, confronting a court presided over by M`ere Folle, and whose members include – in addition to the fools who bring in both Cervantes’s figures and Lacan, and two women fools who regularly (and literally) overstep courtroom boundaries – T.S. Eliot, Antonin Artaud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the exhibition, this hilarious scene full of bickering is literally spatialized, divided between the two screens on opposing walls. Since, as I mentioned, 31

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sound comes from where the characters speak, visitors are compelled to keep changing sides – both physically, in the literal sense, and in terms of their opinion. This restlessness entices them to wonder about their own binary tendencies – the tendency, most of all, to choose sides too quickly, or not quickly enough. It is in this way that the work itself performs thought.15 Davoine wrote her starkly visual book as a mixture of theory, documented practice (in the form of case histories), and fiction. As a character, Franc¸oise stands both for the failure of this practice to deal with madness and for the potential it still has – provided we change our attitude in the face of it, and dare stand side by side with the mad. Structured like a trial in loyalty to the medieval precedent, the two screens facing each other quite literally enact the medieval tradition of the Theatre of Folly. This installation raises the question of the appropriateness of judgment, directing that question away from moralism towards a willingness to abandon the binary opposition of good versus bad. In a subsequent scene in the film, and a juxtaposed video in the exhibition, the analyst offers the analogy with music instead: striking the right chord is more important than diagnosing, judging, and treating. In this work, the modulation of noise versus music seen earlier is theoretically, historically, and theatrically substantiated. This component – the role of music and of sound in general – was our way of spatializing the narrative, of foregrounding the medium, and of socializing the experience by means of its aesthetics. For the film, we worked in close collaboration with the author. She helped us to understand the psychoanalytic situation and get its fictional representation right – right enough, that is, to avoid betraying the mad. But visually, too, her influence was enormous, although she never dictated anything or insisted on any kind of fidelity. The images she had in mind when she wrote her book are inevitably very different from the ones that ended up in the film. There are several layers of interpretation and imagination between the one and the other. This difference is compounded by the fact that the author plays her fictional self; but only after the images had circulated, and Michelle Williams Gamaker and I had transformed them, did they come back to the author, who, by playing her role, transformed them again. The figure of M`ere Folle, for which we cast French literary scholar and theatre director Murielle Lucie Cl´ement, is obviously very different

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from the so-called original. The multiplicity of sources for this figure makes identification with any chosen actress tentative, at least. This is why the video images can only be ‘inter-images’, with several temporal and visual layers separating the ‘original’ from the images in the film. But inter, in this case, also implies the multiple tentacles that extend from the image to ‘touch’ the visitor. The word moving may characterize the medium of film, but it is this second meaning of the term that is not so easy to control.

Affect as a Medium Finally, the interactivity we attempted to achieve depends on affect, but this term must be understood differently from, say, emotion. In my view, and in line with Deleuze’s view in Difference and Repetition, affect is a mobile intensity, floating in space and emanating from objects as much as from subjects; reciprocal and, in this, analogous to language if considered primarily as the interaction between one person and another.16 Affect, thus conceived, is architectural and sculptural. The way in which we engineered the position of sound in the installation overdetermines affect as medium. For this reason, the theatricality is emphatic; the actors playing the two fools, Ariste and Artaud, are theatre actors, and it shows. This theatricality is not, however, an artificiality that undermines the plausibility of the scene. Nor is it a tool for sentimental appeal. On the contrary, while it fits the character and his madness, it also undermines the voyeuristic tendency a more cinematic, realistic acting style might have solicited. The theatricality instead invites the visitor’s participation, the desire to enter the stage and play along. Thus, although never properly seeing mad people, one sees madness, but this madness is contagious rather than scary. The past explains the present, and judgment seems even more out of place when that happens. Ariste’s death seems both inevitable and pointless. Why did he have to die when others can be taken out of their madness? And so the stories continue. The specific contribution of video exhibition as distinct from theatre film is that the time spent is freely given by the visitor, not imposed by the film’s duration. This can, in fact, lead to a longer period of time spent with the installations than the two hours of the film. The specific attraction of an exhibition based on the spatialization of a film may 33

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well be the complex way in which narrative is broken up, so that no story is maintained. As a result, however, narrativity – its dynamism, movement, time, and durational effects – can become even stronger. Transformed into moments of encounter, the narrative of the film becomes organized into a stark first person–second person dialectic; it becomes a space where subjectivity is born, inflected, and strengthened. This, in the end, is what makes spatialized film interactive.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

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See Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), and Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London/New York: Verso, 2012). This exhibition was held from 21 October 2011 to 29 January 2012 at the Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum in Turku, Finland, with an additional satellite exhibition at the City Library in January. It was curated by Mia Hannula and produced for the museum by Pamela Andersson. Under the title Cosas imposibles, it was also held at the Centro de las Artes in Monterrey, Mexico in 2012. Smaller versions (with different titles) have been mounted at the Broadcast Gallery in Dublin, Ireland; at the Goethe Institute in Ankara, Turkey; and at the Kakelhallen Art Gallery in Mariehamn, ˚Aland (Finland). Another exhibition of my video work, Towards the Other (2011), at the Peter and Paul Fortress, Saint Petersburg, Russia, also staged encounters. There, however, visitors audiovisually met actual people who, far from being mad, are our recently or not-so-recently arrived neighbours. See www.miekebal.org/artworks/exhibitions/towards-theother. For the term ‘gallery film’, see Catherine Fowler, ‘Room for Experiment: Gallery Films and Vertical Time from Maya Deren to Eija-Liisa Ahtila’, Screen 45: 4 (2004), pp. 324–43. At the Women’s Arts Resource Centre produced by VTape, Toronto, 3 March–7 April 2012. The book, the film, and the installations all merge fiction and documentary. The death of the patient is real; the trial situation emerges from the guilt the death triggered. The dialogues are almost entirely composed of quotations. See Franc¸oise Davoine, M`ere Folle: R´ecit (Strasbourg: Arcanes, 1998); Franc¸oise Davoine, Mother Folly: A Tale, trans. Judith Miller (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). On our

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

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6

film and related projects, see special dossier of Le Coq-H´eron, no. 211, (December 2012), pp. 117–55 www.crazymothermovie.com. Michelle Williams Gamaker is a video and performance artist. Her PhD dissertation, ‘The Relocation of Art Experience: Social Interrelations and Therapeutic Negotiations in Art Practice’ (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011), develops the concept of art practice on which our film is based. See www.michellewilliamsgamaker.com. Whenever I use the first-person singular in this text, it is to take responsibility for what I write, but please bear in mind that the decisions concerning the film and the exhibition have all been made by Michelle and me together, often in collaboration with others. On this somewhat binary opposition between time and space, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 325. For this concept of aesthetics I rely on the legacy of Gottlieb Baumgarten, whose Aesthetica influenced Kant, and has recently been reconsidered in, for example, Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). The Last Frontier (La u´ ltima frontera) was the title of an exhibition of my video work on migratory culture, held at the Fundaci´on Jos´e Garc´ıa Jim´enes, Murcia, Spain, from 3 February to 29 March 2011. On the tradition of the sotties, see Jelle Koopmans, Le Th´eaˆ tre des exclus au Moyen Age: H´er´etiques, sorci`eres et marginaux (Paris: Imago, 1997). On Cervantes’s traumatic state, see Mar´ıa Antonia Garc´es, Cervantes and Algiers: A Captive’s Tale (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002). The word ‘preposterous’ refers to my theory of productive anachronism in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). This displacing of chairs was not possible in Turku, but happened when the piece was installed in Toronto (VTape, March 2012) as a singular work, without being surrounded by the other pieces. The staff were instructed to prohibit such reorderings of the space. For the term interpretant, see Charles S. Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’, in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 4–23. For the term ‘theoretical object’, currently so much used that it risks losing its specific meaning, see Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch, ‘A Conversation with Hubert Damisch’, October 85 (Summer 1998), pp. 3–17. For Erasmus’s text, see The Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008), pp. 9–10.

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15

16

I consider art capable of producing thought, but not automatically. An artwork that compels thinking, theorizing, and the readjustment of social and political positions can be considered a ‘theoretical object’ (Damisch’s term). Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994).

2 Computer Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Kathryn Brown

Works in digital media have played a mixed role in recent discussions about the social implications of participatory art forms. Although bearing many of the hallmarks of a ‘relational aesthetic’ as described by Nicolas Bourriaud in his influential essay of 1998, computer art is largely absent from Bourriaud’s account of the integration between artist, artwork, and community that, in his view, formed one of the most significant trends in art production of the 1990s.1 Similarly, in her articulation of ways in which art can contribute to the creation of an engaged cosmopolitan subjectivity, Marsha Meskimmon focuses on a range of artworks that both thematize and prompt exchanges across time, national boundaries, and cultures.2 Computer art, however, plays only a minimal role in the imaginary conversations and styles of participation that Meskimmon identifies in the contemporary artworld. Perhaps one reason for placing interactive computer art on the margins of cosmopolitan interaction is its reliance on sophisticated technologies. Typically, users must have access to their own computing facilities or mobile devices in order to participate in the works other than simply as a viewer. While such technologies are widespread, they are not open to all citizens in contemporary societies. Indeed, there are many societies in which very few people have access to technology.3 37

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There seems, therefore, to be an implicit limitation on the global reach of interactive practices in electronic media and on their ability to service a cosmopolitan ideal.4 Another reason why the computer art form has played such a minor role in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism in today’s artworld might also be the suspicions that attach to ways in which we use technology. These range from the identification of similarities between interactive computer artworks and participation in online games and extend to concerns about the erosion of social relations in the wake of individuals’ increasing enjoyment of, and reliance on, a range of mobile computing devices.5 The purpose of this chapter is to examine how computer artworks can transform interactivity from a private to a collective social activity in a way that impacts positively on relationships between strangers in public urban spaces. Specifically, I will argue that participatory works in this medium can both provoke reflection on and influence cosmopolitan life in contemporary cities. In the following analysis of ‘cosmopolitanism’, I am not seeking to elucidate tensions between concepts of nationhood and the identification of transnational rights, duties, and obligations between individuals and/or institutions. Instead, my focus is, broadly, on the notion of ‘moral cosmopolitanism’ and its impact on associational life.6 I am, therefore, primarily concerned with the extent to which interactive computer art can foster a social imaginary that is shaped, as David Held puts it, by appreciation of the ‘bedrock of interest in what it is that human beings have in common, independently of their particular familial, ethical, national and religious affiliations’.7 The argument of this chapter is motivated by a series of largescale, public installations by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.8 I shall argue that Lozano-Hemmer simultaneously exploits and subverts the interface between art and technology for the purpose of testing a concept of political agency and reorienting the ways in which strangers negotiate difference in public. Countering the idea that interactive computer art encourages insularity on the part of its users, I shall also show ways in which Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks function as a form of ‘public sculpture’ that interfaces with the architecture of urban environments. His installations reveal the histories of particular buildings, reshape individuals’ encounters with the familiar spaces they inhabit, and alter the ways in which computer technologies are used within those spaces.

In her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect more From Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle considers how the use of computer technologies (mobile technologies in particular) has affected social relationships and the ways in which individuals behave in public spaces.9 She makes the point that train stations, airports, caf´es, and parks are no longer communal spaces, but simply places of ‘social collection’: people gather in them, but instead of speaking to each other, they are attached to mobile devices and hence to the people and places to which those devices serve as portals. For Turkle, contemporary mobile technology fosters the creation of a ‘tethered self’ that impoverishes public space and fosters insularity. She argues that we fail to see and experience new places because we now bring our ‘homes’ with us on our travels. For Turkle, this produces the result that we no longer truly inhabit public space by sharing it with those around us because technology allows us to remain emotionally and socially ‘tethered’ to our homes.10 Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive computer artworks offer a counterpoint to this concern about the impact of digital technologies on personal behaviour and social relations. The pieces on which I shall focus in this chapter fall into the artist’s set of ‘relational architecture’ works. They are all large-scale, visually spectacular works which, in different ways, rely on audience participation in public spaces of the city. They use sophisticated computer technologies to create a new form of public art. As suggested by the term ‘relational architecture’, the works are designed to interface strongly with local buildings, their histories, and their contemporary usage.11 Countering the point made by Turkle, I shall argue that these works turn spaces of social collection back into communal spaces, and hence reorient the way in which people inhabit and relate to each other within such spaces. The two works on which I shall focus in this section draw contemporary art audiences into a reflection on particular events in European history. The first is called Two Origins, and was shown in the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, France, in 2002. Comprising light projectors, a digital interface, language, and local architecture, the work staged a projection of The Book of Two Origins, a thirteenthcentury heretical manuscript that chronicled the beliefs of the Cathar sect about the dual origins of the universe. The work was designed

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Art, Spectacle, and Political Agency

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INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 2.1 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Two Origins, Relational Architecture 7, 2002. Place du Capitole, Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, France. Photo by Antimodular Research. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

to reflect the role of the Cathars in the local past of the city; they had been violently suppressed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with much of the conflict playing out in Toulouse and its surrounding region. Invoking the dualism that informed Cathar belief, identical pieces of text from The Book of Two Origins were projected by separate machines onto the fac¸ade of the Capitole, and those two projections overlapped to produce linguistic nonsense. With the assistance of viewer intervention, however, it became possible to render the writing legible: when a passer-by blocked one projection with his or her body, the other projected text became visible (Fig. 2.1).12 While the work is based on a very simple form of interactivity, a powerful symbolism underlies it. A viewer quite literally ‘steps in’ to reveal aspects of a belief system and metaphorically to counter an act of religious suppression on one of the sites where that suppression took place. Lozano-Hemmer explained his intentions with the work as follows: ‘Two Origins attempts to connect disparate planes of experience, inviting people to discover texts that have been covered-up [sic] by history and intolerance’; he goes on to suggest that the work references ‘the “minor histories” that characterise European trends of 40

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pluralism and dissent’.13 Through the requirement for interactivity, individual viewers thus use their own bodies to bring to light a piece of local history and, implicitly, to reflect on the role of religious toleration within the contemporary public sphere. Crucially, LozanoHemmer’s work makes it the decision and responsibility of each individual viewer (rather than a state-level authority) to enact a move from the suppression of difference to the acceptance of potentially clashing belief systems. By drawing individual audience members into the work’s display both physically and imaginatively, the work attains a new kind of ‘site specificity’ that thematizes the development of a cosmopolitan public sphere. It is designed to act in dialogue not only with local architecture and history, but also with the physical presence of individuals who are invited to reflect on the toleration of diversity in the contemporary social fabric of the city. The role of interactivity (even at this most basic level) is central to both the aesthetic and political effects of Lozano-Hemmer’s style of public art. Dominic McIver Lopes has argued that computer art is distinctive because the interactivity it solicits on the part of its viewers (or, in this case, ‘users’) changes the display of the work of art – something that does not happen in traditional art forms.14 While Lopes views this type of interactivity as a feature of computer art forms in general, I think a more limited formulation is appropriate in order to distinguish computer artworks that solicit participation for the purpose of changing a visual display from those works that are produced on a computer but whose content remains stable (for example, artworks produced on an iPad or iPhone).15 Taking up Lopes’s point, however, the form of interactivity solicited by Lozano-Hemmer’s computer art is a potent way of making the viewer’s body newly relevant to both the theme of Two Origins (by reflecting on histories of intolerance) and its ontology (by triggering a change in the work’s display). Lozano-Hemmer has commented on the notion of computer art as a participatory medium that has specific consequences for the interpretation of art and its impact on contemporary audiences. Referencing Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘aura’ of artworks, he states: [W]ith digital technologies I believe that the aura has returned, and with a vengeance, because what digital technology emphasizes, through

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interactivity, is the multiple reading, the idea that a piece of art is created by the participation of the user. The idea that a work is not hermetic but something that requires exposure in order to exist is fundamental to understand this ‘vengeance of the aura’.16

There is a sense in which I disagree with Lozano-Hemmer’s characterization of the interactive computer art form. I think it is incorrect to suggest that participation by the viewer (or user) creates the artwork. While the presence of the viewer is relevant to the type of display that is triggered, it does not follow that the work does not exist without the viewer or that there is an overlap between the functions of artist and viewer. As Lopes correctly points out in his analysis of interactive media, ‘the work isn’t the same as its display and an intention to generate a display isn’t an intention to make the work’.17 Nevertheless, Lozano-Hemmer’s comment is important because it identifies the aesthetic and, I shall argue, social importance of interactivity in the computer art form. By undermining the notion of a ‘hermetic’ work of art, as he puts it, Lozano-Hemmer envisages the artwork as a dialogical space that encourages a new form of responsibility on the part of its participants. In other words, the computer artwork’s ‘aura’ is derived from multiple instantiations that are triggered by, and have different personal relevance for, the individuals who contribute physically and imaginatively to the work’s outcome. This point comes to the fore in a work entitled Re:Positioning Fear that was staged in Graz, Austria, in 1997. This work took as its backdrop the Landeszeughaus, a military arsenal built in the mid seventeenth century to house weapons that Austria used to defend itself against invasion by the Ottoman Empire. In this artwork, viewers were detected by surveillance cameras (a point to which I shall return below), and their shadows were, once again, projected onto the fac¸ade of the building; each shadow revealed the typescript of a real-time discussion about the idea of ‘fear’ and its historical transformations (Fig. 2.2).18 In this work, an outline of the viewer’s own body becomes the locus of both self-reflection and political debate. While the Landeszeughaus was designed with the aim of securing a nation’s borders against external encroachment, viewers of Lozano-Hemmer’s work are invited to locate themselves against this historical example and to read their own

COMPUTER ART AND THE COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINATION Figure 2.2 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Re:Positioning Fear, Relational Architecture 3, 1997. Landeszeughaus, Architecture and Media Biennale, Graz, Austria. Photo by Joerg Mohr. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

bodies as part of a discussion about the impact of fear on contemporary discussions concerning the role of national borders, immigration, and cultural identity. Taken together, Two Origins and Re:Positioning Fear invoke aspects of European history that reference religious intolerance and a mistrust of outside influence. The requirement for interactivity draws contemporary viewers into that history and its legacies. Through the invitation to individuals to see themselves as part of the artwork, an aesthetic participatory practice is thus linked to concepts of individual agency within a broader public sphere of debate. In Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, Lea Ypi discusses various ways in which cosmopolitan political change can be effected in contemporary liberal democracies.19 In her examination of methods 43

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by which citizens ‘mobilize’ (or may be mobilized) to bring about such change, Ypi draws an analogy between political agency, as a special kind of ‘creative activity’, and avant-garde art forms. She rightly points out that histories of the artistic avant-garde reveal a strong link between aesthetic innovation and ambitions to effect social transformation. She then shows ways in which familiar forms of expression can be appropriated for the purposes of encouraging a new critical stance on tradition and reinvigorating it with contemporary significance: In a way similar to artists, avant-garde political agents must use imagination and invest creative energies in giving concrete shape to abstract interpretations of the function and purpose of shared institutions. Both kinds of movements aim at transforming society by introducing new conceptual categories, leading a particular public to become aware of the limits of existent discourses and of the opportunities available for innovation in each particular sphere.20

In developing this analogy, Ypi draws out the complementary ways in which political and artistic agents use creative means both to structure their ideas and to communicate them to a mass audience. While her political examples are drawn from contemporary circumstances, however, the notion of the artistic avant-garde through which she propels the discussion is based on analyses of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual art and literature. In my view, Lozano-Hemmer’s public pieces of ‘relational architecture’ can be understood as a contemporary form of avant-garde art that contributes subtly to the creation of political agency on the part of individuals. Not only do the public pieces of ‘relational architecture’ discussed above turn spaces of mere ‘social collection’ (to use Sherry Turkle’s phrase) into ‘communual spaces’, but they prompt participants to reflect on the dominant political discourses that have shaped such spaces. By drawing the participant’s body into the display of the works, Two Origins and Re:Positioning Fear directly implicate their audiences in reflections on national and religious fear and intolerance. In this context, interactivity plays more than an aesthetic role; it is designed to make the political themes of the works personally relevant to the participants. They advance debates about contemporary cosmopolitanism by inviting reflection on ways in which communities have responded to 44

COMPUTER ART AND THE COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINATION Figure 2.3 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6, 2003. Duisburg Akzente Festival, Duisburg, Germany. Photo by Antimodular Research. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

the toleration of difference (both within and between nations). While these works achieve this goal through the use of historical examples, I now want to turn to ways in which Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive computer artworks engage with the experience of ‘otherness’ and difference in contemporary urban spaces.

Conversations between Strangers Body Movies (2001) was first staged in a public venue in the Netherlands (Rotterdam), and has subsequently been shown in cities in China, Austria, Portugal, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. As another large-scale, interactive piece of ‘relational architecture’, the work projects the shadows of passers-by, in a vastly enlarged scale, onto a wall or screen. Portraits of inhabitants of the host city then appear within the projected shadows. It is important to the overall effect of the work that the portraits appear only within the silhouette of the viewer; not only does the physical presence of the viewer trigger the display of the artwork, but his or her bodily outline limits and frames the images that appear on the screen (Fig. 2.3).21 45

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Viewer and viewed are, therefore, doubly implicated in the work’s production: images taken of other people require the viewer’s presence to be made visible, and the viewer’s shadow remains empty unless someone metaphorically steps into its silhouette and animates it. The shadow becomes, as Lozano-Hemmer puts it, ‘a window to an artificial reality’.22 According to the artist, the work not only offers viewers an opportunity to reflect on their own presence in a city space, but – crucially – to see themselves as other people within that space.23 In this regard, Body Movies re-casts the role of the facing subject in conventional portraiture and enables viewers temporarily to embody the viewed subject. An image of shared physicality becomes a metaphor for awareness of a common humanity. This interactive feature of the work has a direct bearing on the way in which individuals inhabit public spaces and, in particular, on encounters between strangers within those spaces. In his book on cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah uses the metaphor of ‘conversation’ as a way of describing ‘engagement with the experience and ideas of others’.24 Conversation across the boundaries of personal and cultural identity does not necessarily lead to consensus, but, for Appiah, it can service a cosmopolitan ideal simply by helping people to ‘get used to one another’.25 This may not amount to the level of avant-garde political agency envisaged by Ypi, as discussed in the previous section, but it does offer a way of understanding the contribution that Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive computer art can make to the development of a cosmopolitan social imaginary. As a work that is staged in public, Body Movies both brings strangers together and invites them to participate in a new conversational forum. My argument is that the work fosters associational life not just by inviting individuals to linger in a public space of the city, but by imaginatively blurring the boundaries between self and other in that space. Body Movies can be said to contribute to the creation of a public sphere in which ‘deliberation across difference’, to adopt one of James Bohman’s formulations, encourages a form of toleration that is ‘both a means and an end for furthering democratization in a situation of undiminished pluralism’.26 By asking participants to commit their own bodies to the artwork, Lozano-Hemmer invites a personal encounter with difference, and asks us to experiment with a form of cosmopolitan engagement as part of our own lived reality.

COMPUTER ART AND THE COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINATION

The work also reorients participants’ relationships to visual and communication technologies. Lozano-Hemmer has stated that Body Movies ‘attempts to misuse technologies of the spectacular so they can evoke a sense of intimacy and complicity instead of provoking distance, euphoria, catharsis, obedience or awe’.27 This is achieved, I would argue, by a deliberate ‘misuse’ of surveillance techniques. The work depends upon the use of technology to detect, film, and project images of the city’s inhabitants. In this regard, it can be viewed as complicit with the ubiquitous CCTV monitoring with which inhabitants of many large cities have become familiar. However, in Body Movies, it is precisely this kind of intrusive technology that is used to connect strangers and to make individuals face each other in new ways. Paradoxically, a digitally mediated vision of city life is designed to reinforce a sense of embodied subjectivity and sociability. For Lozano-Hemmer, the superimposition of imagery in the work comments not only on the relationship between individuals and technology, but also on the way in which the physical make-up of urban environments impacts on personal relations. The artist has discussed a growing distance between individuals and the buildings they inhabit, commenting that ‘globalized cities no longer represent’ their citizens, but instead are planned for the purposes of promoting the efficient generation and circulation of capital.28 Epitomizing the description of his work as a piece of ‘relational architecture’, Body Movies is designed to interrupt the routine ways in which we relate physically and imaginatively to the built environment.29 Forced to abandon their everyday function, buildings become stages upon which strangers are newly connected to each other. In this regard, interactive computer art is given a transformative appeal: an artificial reality is used to reconfigure both urban geography and the social relationships that are forged within it. Under Scan (2005/6) took this strategy a step further. Designed for various pedestrian city spaces in the United Kingdom, it detected the presence of passers-by using a tracking system. When the system is triggered, an interactive video portrait of an individual from the host city appears on the ground within the shadow of the viewer. The projected figure is first shown to be asleep, then wakes up and (crucially) maintains eye contact with the viewer for as long as he

47

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 2.4 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan, Relational Architecture 11, 2008. Trafalgar Square, London, UK. Photo by Antimodular Research. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

or she is present (Fig. 2.4). The projected figure goes to sleep as the viewer moves away, and then gradually disappears.30 Developing the technology of Body Movies, the work offers a more sophisticated simulation of a face-to-face encounter with a stranger in public. Once again, a typically intrusive technology is used to facilitate an enactment of sociability. 48

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The work was commissioned by what was then the East Midlands Development Agency (subsequently replaced by a local enterprise partnership scheme) as part of its mission to establish the East Midlands as a ‘top 20 region’ in Europe by 2010. The contribution of visual art to the presentation of cities within the East Midlands region as vibrant, cosmopolitan spaces was a recurrent theme in promotional material attaching to the Under Scan project. According to various development officers involved in the commission, Under Scan would help to promote an image of the East Midlands as ‘a flourishing region with a diverse and dynamic culture’. Secondly, it would offer people the opportunity to interact playfully in public, urban spaces. Thirdly, it would tour internationally, thereby taking part of the East Midlands abroad with it.31 In addition to its intrinsic aesthetic merits, therefore, Under Scan was envisaged by policy-makers as a means of promoting a particular vision of regional life that was destined to appeal to the idea of a cosmopolitan society. One way in which Lozano-Hemmer’s works achieve this effect is by unsettling familiar boundaries that define geographical spaces and relations between strangers. His pieces of ‘relational architecture’ may be said to encourage the displacement of such boundaries by a broader ‘sense of moral community’, as described by Michael Kenny.32 In his discussion of the rise of this idea in transnational civil societies, Kenny identifies the following key contributory factors: computer-mediated developments that facilitate the sharing of information; the rise of a global media system that promotes mutual understanding; and the participation of both individuals and groups in collective action that takes place across national borders.33 I want to suggest that LozanoHemmer’s public computer artworks can be seen as contributing to a ‘sense of moral community’ as discussed by Kenny, but that they do so in a unique way. While they form part of a ‘computer mediated development’, this does not merely consist in the sharing of information across boundaries in the manner that we have come to expect from digital communications and internet technologies. Instead, his works also test the audience’s expectations about the role of mobile computer technologies in facilitating global communication. This point comes to the fore in the final work I shall consider in this chapter, Amodal Suspension.

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INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 2.5 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Amodal Suspension, Relational Architecture 8, 2003. Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media, Yamaguchi, Japan. Photo by ArchiBiMing. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

Subverting Technology Amodal Suspension was presented in 2003 at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Japan. Whereas the form of interactivity solicited by the works discussed in the previous sections takes the form of direct physical participation by the viewer, Amodal Suspension combined sitespecificity with the use of mobile computing technologies. In this work, individuals were invited to send short text messages to each other using their cell phone or via a web browser. Instead of being sent directly, however, messages were intercepted and encoded as sequences of flashes that were projected onto the night sky by searchlights. In this first stage of the work, therefore, a linguistic, electronic communication is picked up, encoded in a different format, and given a non-linguistic visual display. Furthermore, a private communication between two individuals is made public, but remains ‘illegible’ (Fig. 2.5).34 While these messages were projected by the searchlights, they could be ‘caught’ by individuals using a cell phone or a 3D internet interface. To ‘catch’ a text, users who had registered on the work’s website had to place a ‘catch tool’ over the ray of light that they wanted to catch and to click on it. The message would then be revealed, removed from 50

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the sky, and added to an archive.35 Overcoming the problem of access to technology for the purposes of participating in the work, computer terminals were set up in locations in Spain, Germany, Mexico, India, the Netherlands, Korea, Poland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. When the message was removed from the projection, it then appeared (translated back into linguistic format – in Japanese and English) on the participant’s cell phone or online interface; it was also briefly projected onto the fac¸ade of the museum. Both the author of the message and its intended recipient were notified that this had taken place, and all archived submissions were open to public search. This phase of the work consists in a second process of interception and translation: an interception by a human being (rather than a computer) and a translation back into words. According to information on the official website of the work, over 400,000 visitors from 94 countries (79 per cent from Japan) participated in the project. It is estimated that around 10,000 messages were sent and downloaded.36 Discussing the effect of the work, the artist suggested that it ‘provided a connective platform in which local residents and remote participants from different regions and countries could establish ad hoc relationships’, and that it represented a ‘deviation from the assumed transparency of electronic communication’.37 For the purposes of this chapter’s discussion of cosmopolitanism, there are two things to note in this statement. First, the artist suggests that interactive computer art can generate relationships across national boundaries and second, he envisages a way in which strangers can participate in otherwise private conversations. In this regard, the work gives Appiah’s ‘conversational model’ of cosmopolitanism a particularly tangible form. Lozano-Hemmer’s comment also points to a technological paradox that underpins the work: Amodal Suspension uses sophisticated technology for the purpose of staging the failure of that technology in dramatic fashion. It achieves this by subverting direct forms of communication: messages arrive at the wrong destination; private texts become public; words are translated into an unreadable, though visual language; the instantaneity of contemporary communication is disrupted. Not only does the work interject twists and turns into what we have come to think of as instant messaging, but it gives communication a new density that is designed to engage our senses more fully.

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Lozano-Hemmer mentions that another ‘objective of the piece was to make a public spectacle by using the private medium of text messaging, slowing down communication and introducing the possibility of interception’.38 While we usually think of interception as an intrusion or a form of monitoring, here it becomes a vital step in the mediation of personal communication. The work takes up a technology that is potentially private and isolating and transforms it into a medium that is both public and communal. This interruption of technological isolation offers a counterpoint to Turkle’s idea that the use of personal computer technologies gradually erodes social relations. Amodal Suspension deliberately exploits our habitual use of private messaging for the purpose of opening it up to new sensory possibilities and to interaction between strangers. In that regard, at least, interactive art is implicated in reformulating norms of social interaction between individuals in urban spaces, and re-casting the way in which our use of mobile technologies shapes behaviour in such spaces. Kriss Ravetto-Bagioli has argued that Lozano-Hemmer’s works ‘bypass the false dichotomies between technophilia and technophobia’, and that they ‘neither celebrate the new media’s potential to create innovative forms of interactivity and socially meaningful ways to reclaim public space nor claim to foster freedom of expression, whether that is human or nonhuman’.39 Instead, she argues that the artist seeks to conflate power relationships through his invocation of surveillance techniques and public visibility. I agree with Ravetto-Bagioli that Lozano-Hemmer’s works should not be viewed as simply staging (or trying to resolve) a conflict between arguments for or against the impact of digital technologies on everyday life. However, this focus on surveillance undermines the broader social impact of LozanoHemmer’s works, and also overlooks comments made by the artist himself about the positive uses to which technology can be put in the computer art form. Lozano-Hemmer has drawn a distinction between the roles of technology in promoting ‘collective’ and ‘connective’ intelligence. He describes the former as an ‘unbearable utopian vision of communities that form a global village’, but also notes the flattening and elitist notion of ‘community’ that underpins this idea.40 By positing, instead, the idea of a ‘connective’ platform, Lozano-Hemmer suggests that

COMPUTER ART AND THE COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINATION

technology can establish relations between people while preserving and acknowledging different ‘planes of existence’.41 This supports the link between computer art and cosmopolitanism that I have discussed here. Illustrating James Bohman’s idea that ‘deliberation across difference’ can contribute to the creation of a more tolerant society, Lozano-Hemmer’s emphasis on ‘connectivity’ identifies a role for interactive computer art in drawing people together in real and virtual environments while preserving and accepting differences of identity, experience, and lifestyle. I have tried here to show ways in which the participatory practices fostered by this art form can be understood as contributing to the creation of such a cosmopolitan imagination among its audiences. I have discussed a range of artworks that prompt reflection on the way in which we structure, and are structured by, the physical and technological infrastructure of globalized systems of communication and the physical make-up of public spaces. The way in which they achieve this is important. Each of the works by Lozano-Hemmer that I have discussed in this chapter invites a form of participation – each depends on a level of audience interactivity for its look, meaning, and effectiveness. That interactivity takes place by means of a sophisticated technology, but it is one that also draws people to physical sites of collective participation, and that fosters relationships between people in those spaces in unexpected ways. Meskimmon has argued that one of the vital contributions of art to the cosmopolitan imagination is to ‘enable us to participate in, and potentially change, the parameters through which we negotiate the world’.42 The purpose of this chapter has been to identify ways in which Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive computer art opens up a range of physical, imaginary, and virtual spaces within which to effect such change.

Notes 1

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les Presses du r´eel, 2009). Bourriaud’s discussion of technology focuses primarily on screen-based imagery, and on the ‘production-oriented relationships’ that he considers are symbolized by technological models: ‘Art only exercises its critical duty with regard to technology from the moment when it shifts

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2 3

4

5

6

7 8

9 10

54

its critical challenges. So the main effects of the computer revolution are visible today among artists who do not use computers. On the other hand, those who produce so-called “computer graphic” images, by manipulating synthetic fractals and images, usually fall into the trap of illustration’ (pp. 67–8). Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London/New York: Routledge, 2011). Consider, for example, Clay Shirky’s account of the ‘digital divide’ and the background information he provides on access to basic telephony in Clay Shirky, ‘Half the World’ (Version 1.03, 3 September 2002), at shirky.com/writings/half the world.html. (accessed 7 December, 2012) It could be argued, however, that similar limitations also apply to the global accessibility of many other artworks in traditional media such as painting, film, and sculpture. Grant Tavinor examines gaming as an artform, and considers debates about the social and ethical implications of participation in this medium in The Art of Videogames (Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Pauline Kleingeld examines and contrasts different concepts of cosmopolitanism in ‘Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas 60: 3 (1999), pp. 505–24. She points out that the notion of ‘moral cosmopolitanism’ (‘the view that all human beings are members of a single moral community’) is closest in conception to the ancient view of this idea as developed by the Stoics (p. 507). David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals, Realities and Deficits (Cambridge/Malden MA: Polity Press, 2010), p. x. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967, and currently lives and works in Canada. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012–3), the Fundaci´on Telef´onica, Argentina (2012); bitforms gallery, New York (2012); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2011); La Gaˆıt´e Lyrique, Paris (2011); and the Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2011), among others. His public artworks have been staged in cities around the world, and have been specially commissioned for particular events, including the fiftieth anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum (New York) and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010). He represented Mexico at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), pp. 154ff. Ibid., p. 155.

12

13 14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Lozano-Hemmer discusses his use of the term ‘relational’ in this context, and distinguishes it from Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ in an interview with Jos´e Luis Barrios, ‘Reflections around Loose Ends’ in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer et al., Some Things Happen More Often than All of the Time, exhibition catalogue, Venice Biennale (Madrid: Turner, 2007), pp. 142–51, at pp. 147–8. A full description of this and the other works discussed in this chapter can be found on the artist’s website, at www.lozano-hemmer.com/ two origins.php. (accessed 18 July, 2012) Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, p. 81. Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art (London/New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 26–7. Consider, for example, David Hockney’s iPhone drawings, images of which are available on his website, at www.hockneypictures.com/ iphone pages/iphone etcetera-01.php. (accessed 18 July, 2012) Conversation between Jos´e Luis Barrios and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, ‘Reflections around Loose Ends’, in Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, pp. 142–51, at p. 143. Lopes, Philosophy of Computer Art, p. 75. For further details of the installation, see the project description on the artist’s website, at www.lozano-hemmer.com/repositioning fear.php. (accessed 12 December, 2012) Lea Ypi, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ibid., p. 161. For further description, see Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, p. 75. See also the project description on the artist’s website, at www.lozanohemmer.com/body movies.php. (accessed 12 December, 2012) Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, p. 146. Ibid., 146. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 85. Ibid., 85. James Bohman, ‘Discursive Toleration’, Political Theory 31: 6 (December 2003), pp. 757–79, at p. 775. Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, p. 75. Ibid., 146. Ibid. A detailed description of the project and its underlying technology can be found in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and David Hill, eds, Under

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11

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31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42

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Scan (Nottingham/Montreal: East Midlands Development Agency and Antimodular Research, 2007), pp. 9–28. See also the description on the artist’s website, at www.lozano-hemmer.com/under scan.php. (accessed 12 December, 2012) See Lozano-Hemmer and Hill, Under Scan, pp. 6–7. Michael Kenny, ‘Global Civil Society: A Liberal-Republican Argument’, Review of International Studies 29 (2003), pp. 119–43, at p. 128. Ibid. The artist describes the project in Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, p. 87. See the detailed description of the work on the artist’s website, at www.lozano-hemmer.com/amodal suspension.php. (accessed 12 December, 2012) Statistics taken from the Amodal Suspension website, at www.amodal .net/intro.html. (accessed 12 July, 2012) Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, quoted on the Amodal Suspension website, at www.amodal.net/concept.html. (accessed 22 July, 2011) Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, quoted on the artist’s website, at www.lozanohemmer.com/amodal suspension.php. (accessed 22 July, 2011) Kriss Ravetto-Bagioli, ‘Shadowed by Images: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the Art of Surveillance’, Representations 111: 1 (2010), pp. 121–43, at p. 123. Lozano-Hemmer, Some Things Happen, p. 147. Ibid. Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, p. 6.

3 Participatory Art and the Everyday: A South African Perspective Nicola Grobler

South Africa is known for the wide diversity of its people. With 11 official languages, multiple cultures, and an income index with ten steps between abject poverty and the super-rich, it poses particular problems for artists and curators who try to attract the whole social spectrum as viewers of, or participants in, a work of art. But South Africa’s long history of exclusion makes many artists prone to projects of inclusion that are designed to tap into the multi-perspectival richness of the country’s cultures. Increasingly, participatory or collaborative art projects are instigated with the intention of attracting a wider audience. These works are often situated outside traditional art institutions and their conventions: in urban streets, inner-city gyms, or public spaces.1 Many of these participatory projects have an ameliorative or ‘feel-good’ effect. I would venture that many artists in South Africa see their role as mediators of social relations, as suggested by Nicolas Bourriaud, aiming to aid social cohesion, and possibly to bring about changes in perceptions about culture or race.2 In this chapter I will investigate the roles of artist and audience in participatory media from my practical perspective as an artist. While considering the particularities of place, namely South Africa, I will 57

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 3.1 Nicola Grobler, Small Victories during Cape 09: Convergence, Cape Town Metrorail station with Meschac Gaba’s Ambulant in the foreground, May 2009. Image: Roland Metcalfe.

reflect on the agency of audiences to adhere to, resist, or interpret the parameters of such artworks. Throughout this chapter, reference will be made to my artwork, Small Victories (2007–9), as a case study to reflect on the nature of the experience that I predicted for myself and my audience. Small Victories followed a relational art model, in which the artwork comprised the situated event, the people involved, and their exchanges. Participants shifted the parameters of the work to suit their own expressive needs, and directed the outcome of the project (Fig. 3.1). I will also reflect on Lerato Bereng’s curatorial project Thank You Driver (2009) in light of the range of responses from audiences to the artworks included in this mobile exhibition. Bereng selected seven artists to stage their works inside mini-bus taxis and at the main taxi terminal in Cape Town. Both Thank You Driver and Small Victories entailed art encounters in the public realm, in which an unsuspecting public was presented with artworks that elicited reactions designed to reshape routine experience. My aim is to evaluate the audience’s responses to these participatory artworks. I will argue that the slippage between art and life as experienced in these works is indicative of the potential for art to effect social change. 58

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Thank You Driver and Small Victories were motivated by considerations about the socio-political conditions of South Africa’s ‘Mother City’. Beautiful, vibrant and creative, Cape Town was recently crowned World Design Capital for 2014, and cradles one of the new Seven Wonders of Nature, Table Mountain, within its city limits. Yet despite its liberal leanings, the city remains segregated on many levels. Its topographical layout reinforces the divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, with the latter inhabiting townships located far from the city centre and the former happily perched on the slopes of Table Mountain.3 Apartheid’s architects and city planners orchestrated forced removals, and relocated large numbers of people to the Cape Flats, in an area that includes Gugelethu, Langa, Mitchell’s Plain, Hanover Park and Khayelitsha. This hierarchical relation between centre and periphery (along with other remnants of South Africa’s colonial past) persists today.4 With this relationship in mind, Bereng describes minibus taxis as the thread that holds Cape Town together, connecting the outer areas with the city centre. By presenting an art exhibition in these taxis, she draws attention to the significance of commuting and the lopsided urban development that shapes the social geography of South African cities. In a rare occurrence, the users of public transport have an advantage over commuters in private vehicles. Without stepping out of their daily routine, they can encounter artworks that others would have to seek out (Fig. 3.2). By contrast, I contemplated Capetonians from a more static position, while lunching on Thibault Square in the city centre. Ironically, this privately owned square is one of the few ‘public’ areas in Cape Town, where people from all walks of life interact and mingle.5 In South Africa, social life is increasingly privatized: mall culture proliferates, so that access to public spaces can be controlled. Intrigued by the inhabitants of my adopted city and frustrated by the unease with which different cultural and racial groups mixed, I thought of ways to access the hidden motivations of my fellow Capetonians.

Small Victories At the core of this project lies the collapse of hierarchies between social classes, between artist and audience, and between significant and 59

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 3.2 Thank You Driver (2009). Minibus taxis were identified by the Thank You Driver slogan in their rear windows. Image: Cape Africa Platform.

insignificant things. My artistic work aims to function as a magnifying glass, drawing attention to the detail and detritus of everyday life. By elevating the ephemeral and devalued as subject matter, my work reframes and challenges established hierarchies within South African urban society. These hierarchies relate to power relations and the social codes that influence human behaviour and networks. Small Victories was motivated by the usual triggers for relational art, as described by Claire Bishop – namely, ‘activation, authorship and community’.6 Firstly, through engaging with the public directly, I wished to encourage people to re-evaluate the significance of small gestures or events. My method was ameliorative as opposed to antagonistic, and was influenced by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s utopian Palace of Projects (1995–8), a space within which ordinary people submitted their plans or ideas for improving society.7 Secondly, by sharing the authorship and experience of the work with many people, I sought to extract multiple points of view. I hoped that their narratives would reveal the character of the city much more than my own limited experience could. Thirdly, in the South 60

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African context, where only a small percentage of the population visits museums or galleries, I thought that a participatory model could offer an opportunity to create new art audiences. Tenuous relations between different cultural groups and a widening socio-economic divide mean that there is fertile ground for reparation. The final motivating factor was my own unfamiliarity with many of Cape Town’s established communities. Through this participatory project, I wished to shift the parameters of my own understanding of humanity in a divided and violent country. Small Victories facilitated a conversation (conducted in English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa) about everyday life, and drew attention to experiences that are typically undervalued in a society obsessed with success and the ostentatious display of material wealth. The process was simple: I collected people’s small achievements – written and drawn – in exchange for a drinking mug that was presented, in each case, as a ‘trophy’. The exchanges of victories for trophies took place on weekly Trophy Days, and were celebrations of the often forgotten victories that we experience on a regular basis. A new series of trophies was produced for each art event, emblazoned with victories from previous contributors. These were then exchanged with the next group of participants at the following Trophy Day. The drinking-mug trophies were central to the continuation of the idea: these functional rewards would serve as additions to the eclectic collection of vessels typically found in office kitchenettes or homes. With each future coffee break, the mugs would act as gentle reminders to treasure small achievements.8 At the conclusion of each Small Victories cycle, an artist’s book was produced containing the collection of drawings and handwritten texts, along with details of each contributor. The work was first developed for Carine Zaayman’s curatorial project, Jozi and the (M)other City (2008). With a focus on the distinctive – and often fictional – characteristics of South Africa’s two major cities, Johannesburg and Cape Town, the project was driven by Zaayman’s aim to capture the ‘intangible energies’ with which these cities are imbued.9 I collected minor achievements in the city of Cape Town; the trophy mugs and artists’ books were later exhibited in the Michaelis Galleries at the University of Cape Town.10 A year later the project was presented during Cape 09: Convergence, a short-lived biennale of contemporary African culture, which

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had a strong social agenda. Cape 09 wanted to involve people from across the cultural divide and to reach a wider audience.11 The biennale eschewed the traditional exhibition format in favour of a decentralized model, with smaller events taking place in peripheral or unusual sites, such as a high school in Langa, Look Out Hill in Khayelitsha, and Bereng’s art taxis.12 The sites where Small Victories was held were significant. For the first realization of the project (2007–8), I collected victories from four locations. The first three – Thibault Square, Cape Town’s main train station, and my own neighbourhood (Observatory) – were selected on the basis that they are areas through which people from mixed cultural and income groups pass, or within which they reside. The fourth location, entitled ‘I am the local’, was a roving site that enabled me to collect victories from people I encountered on a regular basis (for example, security guards at my studio, or shop assistants). For its second realization, during Cape 09, the project consisted of a succession of Trophy Days held at Cape Town’s Metrorail station (Fig. 3.3). The narratives I collected ranged from trivial achievements to major events. Several participants recorded their financial woes or wider socio-economic problems. Ultimately, my collection of contributions reflected simple joys as well as more ambiguous hues of life experiences: a boy in Observatory expressed his joy that he didn’t have to walk to his corner shop to buy sweets. He found exactly what he was looking for at an informal trader’s sidewalk shop just a couple of blocks from where he lived. Another celebrated the fact that her friend made pancakes ‘when it wasn’t even a rainy day’. Some of the victories revealed private moral concerns. One man confessed, for example, that he had considered driving away after causing extensive damage to another person’s car, but had finally opted to stay on the scene and deal with the situation. Some participants ignored my patient explanation of a small victory as opposed to a substantial recent event. A young man recounted a three-tier victory: on his birthday his wife had given him a massage and then given birth to their first child. One participant wrote about his first encounter with his biological father. Another related his survival of a horrible fire earlier that week that had killed his neighbours. On occasion, the questionnaire was used as a platform for expression or soapbox, in lieu of anything better. A self-described ‘gangster’ spent a long time scrawling his life story over the page. The victory was hidden,

PARTICIPATORY ART AND THE EVERYDAY: A SOUTH AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE Figure 3.3 Nicola Grobler, Small Victories (2007–8): Mr Khan/The Scarf King (Durbanite, jack-of-all), August 2008.

but in his writing and drawing he encapsulated his sense of belonging and the order of his universe. In his life, the brotherhood of his gang held most significance, with the interior of Pollsmoor prison as their turf.13 I was anxious that he would insist on a trophy, as there were a limited number available each day and some people had to return in a fortnight to collect one. He appeared a while later, gave the crowd an once-over, and left (Fig. 3.4). Everyone interpreted the ‘brief’ in their own way, even though the conversations about what defines a minor achievement were quite similar. In my view, the strength of the project lay in people’s embrace 63

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 3.4 Nicola Grobler, Small Victories (2009): Mr T (Heideveld, gangster), June 2009.

of the interpretative and expressive potential of the platform – an aspect to which I will return below.

Taxi Culture Curator Lerato Bereng faced a similarly unpredictable situation with her contribution to Cape 09, entitled Thank You Driver. As her curatorial effort was mobile, audiences had to ‘catch it’ if they could. Ardent art-followers often found it difficult to locate the specific vehicles on busy taxi routes, whereas unsuspecting commuters in the cramped art taxis faced a different sort of disruption to their expected journey. In Bereng’s view, taxis are effective forms of public transport, shadowing bus routes and filling in where a stretched public transport system simply cannot cope.14 Nevertheless, they also increase traffic levels, and passengers often complain about unsympathetic drivers and their discomfort in shared vehicles that make the driver’s trip more 64

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economically viable. Additionally, taxi drivers are notorious for their disregard of traffic laws and passenger safety. Taxi culture in South Africa has developed its own lingo, sign language, and rituals that are particular to each city.15 For example, when travelling on longer routes from Cape Town central to Gugulethu or Khayelitsha, the front passenger is expected to assume the automatic role of the ‘Gaji’, or fare-collector, without so much as a glance, or thank you, from the driver.16 The title, Thank You Driver, refers to the specific phrase that is used in Cape Town to indicate a stop. Within the microcosm of the vehicle, one needs to know the unspoken laws and customs of the taxi. As taxi drivers spend long hours each day in their vehicles, the interiors and exteriors are personalized to suit the drivers’ tastes, even though the taxis usually belong to someone else. Most taxis have oversized tyres with mag wheels, and popular slogans adorn the back window. Thus the public space of the taxi also has a private dimension that reflects a certain attitude and ownership.17 This was an important aspect of the taxi artworks: drivers might feel that the artworks invaded their personal space. It was therefore of utmost importance for the particular driver to understand and support the relevant artist’s work. Developing the analogy of a mobile gallery, the driver took on the role of gallerist who endorsed the artist and accommodated the requirements of his or her work. Whereas gallerists benefit economically from successful art shows, however, these drivers had no vested interest in the artist’s success or failure. Another economy was at stake here – that of providing a transport service to earn a living. Within these parameters, artworks that contributed to the pleasant experience of commuters, thereby attracting business, were successful. Artworks that had the opposite effect on commuters were unpopular with the taxi drivers. The artists’ collective, Gugulective, ran one of the more successful projects, in which they staged a performance with an in-taxi hostess complete with cash-till.18 Styled on the image of the traditional airhostess, with court shoes and fitted uniform, she adopted an ameliorative role and made passengers feel at home with greetings, weather forecasts, and refreshments. Commuters appreciated her attentive presence, which contrasted with the usually dismissive treatment from the taxi

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INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 3.5 Nasti´o Mosquito, Dreams and Illusions, on the Wynberg taxi route.

driver. With free snacks to boot, this particular taxi was a hit. People recognized and waited for the vehicle, which meant increased business for the driver. By contrast, the Angolan poet and artist, Nasti´o Mosquito, had to rethink his performance after encountering an aggressive response from commuters. He blackened the windows of the taxi and installed Christmas lights in order to disrupt the certainty of place (Fig. 3.5). His interaction with the audience entailed recalling random historical facts about Cape Town and reading from books. Commuters found Mosquito’s presence invasive and even intimidating. Eventually, he recorded his disjointed narratives as a radio show for the taxi, which elicited a more positive response from the passengers. The drivers often turned out to be harder to manage than the audiences. With Mosquito’s work, the driver would often switch the taxi’s interior lights on, disrupting the mood that the artist wanted to create. The work of Edwige Aplogan, an artist from Benin, received a very firm response. Aplogan’s work, Deader than the Future, presented absurd futuristic projections of the year 2060. She created newspapers with fictional stories, and presented these inside a Perspex human figure 66

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Figure 3.6 Sculpture from Edwige Aplogan’s Deader than the Future.

with shelving as its back. The sculpture was installed on the front seat between the driver and front passenger, and it startled the audience because of its tiny male genitals (Fig. 3.6). The sculpture made reference to the sexual politics of the front seat. Neither men nor women wanted to share the front seat with this effigy, and the sculpture disappeared mysteriously after a few days. It has not yet been found. With Thank You Driver, Bereng’s aim was to bring art closer to everyday life and to draw on the collective dimension of social experiences. In the process of closing the gap between art and life (when art becomes life), the audience’s response is difficult to predict. Within the confines of the taxi, hierarchies between artwork and audience collapsed, and viewers felt entitled to respond decisively to the work. The audience may not even have experienced the works as art, but rather reacted to the invasion of their personal space. Similarly, the taxi drivers themselves responded forcefully to the moral and economic implications of ‘exhibiting’ works of art. As the space between audience and artwork contracted, the usual conventions that signalled the aesthetic qualities of the work (such as gallery structures or security guards) disintegrated. 67

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Authorship, Everyday Life, and Agency The issue of authorship within participatory projects has attracted much critical attention. One of the reasons for this extended debate is the varying degrees of control that artists exercise over their human ‘subjects’. Artists make use of various triggers to elicit a reaction from the audience, but how ‘authentic’ is such a response? In this section I will discuss the way in which the notion of collective authorship affects my own art practice. While one may predict certain behaviours on the part of an audience, it is only through action that such predictions can be tested. In both Thank You Driver and Small Victories, the artist offers the audience access to a particular experience.19 It is for the audience to decide whether, and how, to respond. Initially, with Small Victories, I faced the challenge of how to elicit a response. At first, I interviewed people on Thibault Square and left a drop-box for their contributions at a nearby sandwich shop. No one bothered to complete the forms or drop them off. Being uncomfortable with asking strangers for a ‘favour’, I had to try a number of approaches before finding the right fit for the project. It soon became clear that the success of the work depended on my individual engagement with each person to stimulate interest in the project. For visual effect, I pushed a tea trolley filled with drinking mugs, which garnered attention on Thibault Square and drew a crowd at Cape Town station. On the first Trophy Day during Cape 09, eager participants mobbed both me and my assistant, Inoba Siwundla, while we were unpacking trophies onto the tea trolley. I cynically thought that some contributors were sharing their victories only to get a free trophy. On reading their victories, however, I realized that this was not the case. Many participants were prepared to share revealing details of their private lives, and their curiosity about the project was infectious. Anna Dezeuze compares different ways of involving the audience in artworks. She contrasts works that allow for a range of interpretations from the participant with those in which the artist directs the interaction for the purpose of accomplishing a very particular task.20 Kester also identifies a tension between artworks as ‘preconceived entities’ and those that are ‘situationally responsive’, and more loosely conceived.21

PARTICIPATORY ART AND THE EVERYDAY: A SOUTH AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

Figure 3.7 Explaining the process of Small Victories during Cape 09 Convergence, Cape Town Metrorail station, June 2009. Photo: Roland Metcalfe.

Finally, Bishop traces the different lineages of an ‘authored’ and ‘deauthored’ tradition: ‘one is disruptive and interventionist, the other constructive and ameliorative’.22 In between these modes of inclusion lie a range of options. During the production of Trophy Days at Cape Town’s Metrorail station, I experienced a reciprocal process in which my own intentions as an artist were but one aspect of a collaborative event (Fig. 3.7). There was no need to approach individuals to engage them in the work, because a steady knot of people gathered around the tea trolley and attracted passing commuters. Siwundla and I could only explain to one small group at a time how the process worked. But participants waited patiently for their turn as we explained the premise of the work in different languages. Participants then took over the task of describing the idea to newcomers, and drew up a ‘waiting list’ for pamphlets and pens. The crowd functioned as a closed system and determined its own set of rules and order. Participants would reprimand anyone who tried to squeeze in or jump the queue. At one point a scuffle broke out by the tea trolley, but the participants gathered around and halted the fight. 69

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My experience of strangers acting in equilibrium was significant. The system of interaction that evolved between participants and the unfolding of their responses to me emulated the ‘flow’ of the creative process of working on individual art objects. Thus the project developed organically and experientially, as opposed to becoming a formulaic undertaking. Here I find that Kester’s ideas on dialogical practices echo some of my own concerns. Kester examines works in which insight is gained through ‘durational interaction rather than a rupture’.23 In his view, the lack of attention paid to collaborative practices based on longer-term, collective practices amounts to a disavowal of important forms of knowledge that art can produce. Dialogical work requires a ‘slowing down’, and a responsiveness to events as they unfold. The conversations that I had with participants were thus often meandering. A results-driven approach would have made my collaborators balk at the idea of participating, arguably due to an over-exposure to the effect on their everyday lives of direct marketing and rigid work-systems. As conversations unfolded, oral narratives infused the written words that spilled over into margins, struggling to be contained on an A5 sheet of paper. Written contributions functioned as part of a wider network of exchanges that only those who participated in the event would fully appreciate. Due to the immersive and experiential nature of collaborative work, the results can be more satisfying than placing a completed idea into the public domain. As time progressed and the range of participants and contributions grew, I detected incremental adjustments in my own perceptions of the city and its inhabitants. The process of revisiting an idea through real-time interactions with a range of ‘ordinary’ Capetonians was infinitely enriching. In the case of Small Victories, a collaborative approach meant that the work unfolded as a result of many interactions, or non-interactions. My role as ‘author’ of the project became manifest when I provided the initial framework for the project and then selected contributions for the drinking mugs or the books. The rest of the time, however, I depended on the willingness of the audience to create an environment conducive to the aims of the work. As I have noted, one of the aims of participatory art is to collapse the hierarchies of art production and to empower the audience. But critics of such practices have been quick to point out the flaws inherent

PARTICIPATORY ART AND THE EVERYDAY: A SOUTH AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

in such an attitude. They argue that one cannot claim agency for the audience without reducing participation to the imposition of an instrumental response. For instance, antagonistic practices are based on pre-empting a conflict in which the artist predetermines the audience’s response. Dialogical practices, on the other hand, encourage a level meeting ground, on which there is room for preconceived ideas to be reconsidered as part of the creative process. Small Victories operated outside the conventions of the gallery, where certain types of behaviour are demanded. I chose sites where I would encounter a wide range of people, without being restricted by art conventions. The dilapidated railway station (since renovated) was an unlikely place to encounter art, and the majority of participants were not high-income culture aficionados. People therefore responded with spontaneity and the freedom to interpret the project as they chose. Furthermore, Trophy Days took place on Saturdays, when commuters were less stressed and more open to the unexpected. Thus the site and timing of the events were key elements in attracting a varied audience as participants. The social value of Small Victories is significant when considering the range of contributions and the transformative potential of the work. There is agency in the miniscule shifts occasioned by perceiving one’s own situation and abilities. Small Victories employs participation for the purpose of making manifest a shared humanity among strangers. With its emphasis on everyday events, the work’s point of entry is quiet and discreet. Ordinary life is understood to be ambiguous, and within its mundane aspects lies the potential to effect change. Routine is not only a realm in which actions are repeated ad nauseam; it is also a place in which changes in personal behaviour can affect a broader social system.24 My art practice seeks to propel this process by registering incremental shifts, cherishing the evanescent, archiving micro-histories, or altering ways in which people relate to each other. One participant’s ‘small victory’ was to make contact with a homeless man who survived on the fringes of society. She described him as a surreal character who lived ‘in a different bandwidth’. By making contact, she transgressed a social boundary marking a very wide cultural and economic divide. The participant reflected afterwards that Small Victories made the raw experiences of her encounter concrete. Importantly, the social interaction she described would still have

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taken place, but no one would have known about it. By giving individuals a forum for expression, my participatory artwork endows single encounters with a significance beyond the local and personal. Ben Highmore advances a theory of everyday life and agency in which the ‘world-enlarging capacity of everyday life’ facilitates a ‘substantial sensorial change’ that often goes unnoticed.25 He explains how habits slowly shift to include other experiences and patterns of thinking as the ordinary world evolves. Drawing on Jacques Ranci`ere’s notion of the ‘redistribution of the sensible’, he describes a ‘dynamic arena constantly managed by the policing activities of forces bent on maintaining what and who will be visible’.26 But this arena is constantly ‘disrupted by aesthetic and political acts’ that affect the social order.27 Small Victories can be understood as a political act if one considers this notion of incremental change and the wider significance of singular acts. As I have noted, many of the victories expressed in the work manifested the poetry of the everyday in their consideration of others and in the simple pleasures that they brought to light. There is opportunity for grace amid the measured pace of daily life. Small Victories reflects the ‘practical science within singularity’ that Michel de Certeau identified in the everyday.28 De Certeau challenged the notion of routine, and set out to capture the diverse ways in which people attend to familiar activities such as walking, shopping, and cooking. The everyday can offer a surprising potential for people to find a means of self-expression, or to appreciate familiar things for their own pleasure or purpose. De Certeau noted that the actions (what he calls ‘tactics’) that people engage in can have an aesthetic value, whereby a ‘poetic gesture . . . bends the use of common language to its own desire in a transforming reuse’.29 Thank You Driver and Small Victories demonstrated how, in the South African context, participatory artforms are capable of effecting such transformation.

Notes 1

2

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See Anthea Moys, Boxing Games (2007), with George Khosi’s Rhema boxing club in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, available at www.antheamoys .com. (accessed 1 June, 2012) Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Michael Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du r´eel, 2009), pp. 14– 8.

4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13

14

15

16 17 18

Miriam Asmal-Dik and Edgar Pieterse, eds, Cape 09: Convergence (catalogue) (Cape Town: Cape Africa Platform, 2009). Jeremy Cronin, “How History Haunts Us”, Times Live, 29 April 2012, available at www.timeslive.co.za/local/2012/04/29/how-historyhaunts-us. (accessed 1 June, 2012) As elsewhere, public spaces are constantly under threat of development. See ‘Sea Point Lobby Group Delighted at Court Ruling’, IOL 2010, available at www.iolproperty.co.za/roller/news/entry/sea point lobby group delighted. (accessed 1 June, 2012) Claire Bishop, ‘Viewers as Producers’, in Claire Bishop, ed., Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art (London/Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006), p. 12. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Palace of Projects (Crystal Palace, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1998). Each mug was tagged with a link to the Small Victories blog, so that participants with access to the internet could seee other contributions. See trophydays.wordpress.com. Carine Zaayman, Jozi and the (M)other city (University of Cape Town: Cape Town, 2008), pp. 6–11. For a review of the exhibition, see Rory Bester, ‘The Curatorial Moment’, Art South Africa 7: 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 89–91. The biennale provided a training ground for young curators, many of whom have since made their mark in South Africa. See Asmal-Dik and Pieterse, Cape 09. For a survey, see Sean O’Toole, ‘Cape 09’ (review), Frieze, 125, September 2009, pp. 132–3. For insight into gangsterism, see Jonny Steinberg, The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs ( Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2004), and Mikhael Subotzky’s hard-hitting photo-series on Pollsmoor prison, Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners) (2004). Fortunately, the Cape Town Integrated Rapid Transit (IRT) system will begin to address the city’s transport problems. From 2010 the city has seen the roll-out of the MyCiti bus transport system, with dedicated bus lanes, including a link to Cape Town International Airport. Susan Woolf has completed a doctoral study of the hand signs that make up taxi culture in Johannesburg. See Pam Allara, ‘Short Left’, Art South Africa 7: 3 (2009), p. 39. Author interview with Lerato Bereng, 26 February 2011. Interview with Lerato Bereng, in Asmal-Dik and Pieterse, Cape 09. Most of the information on Thank You Driver was gleaned from my interview with Lerato Bereng, 2011.

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Ren´e van de Vall, At the Edges of Vision: A Phenomenological Aesthetics of Contemporary Spectatorship (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Anna Dezeuze, introduction to Anna Dezeuze, ed., The ‘Do-It-Yourself ’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 8–15. Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 32. Bishop, ‘Viewers as Producers’, p. 11. Kester, The One and the Many, p. 65. See also Ben Higmore’s discussion of Michel de Certeau’s ‘science of singularity’ which demonstrates the transformative and cumulative effect of individual habits. Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2011). Ibid., pp. 164–71. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol 2: Living and Cooking, new edn, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 254.

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4

Social Landscapes: Andrew ¨ Gallivant and Alex Kotting’s Hartley’s Nowhereisland Joel Robinson

‘Landscape’ commonly refers to a genre of visual art, but also to actual places represented in art. Landscape is therefore commonly construed as something pictorial, a passive vista or series of vistas, framed by the gaze on aesthetic grounds. It is experienced spectatorially, predominantly through the sense of vision, by individual subjects. It is deemed to be worthy of appreciation and artistic treatment in and for itself, without the need for figurative or narrative additions. On this definition, which materialized in the eighteenth century, landscape is reified as an almost exclusively spatial phenomenon, and is often dissociated from the temporal or human activity that takes place within it. In English landscape gardening and the painting associated with it, the enjoyment of prospects – which are said to be beautiful or picturesque – is often bound up with the desire to escape from, or remove any trace of, the social. Hence the strong associations of the term ‘landscape’ with predominantly rural or rustic views. But there is another way of thinking about landscape that has been eclipsed by an academic tradition in which the visual is privileged over other experience. Instead of a static object of the gaze, landscape may be understood as a temporal and experiential field, a social environment in 77

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which the spectator is implicated and acts a part. Here, one’s relationship with landscape is not marked by the ‘separation and detachment’ of vision.1 Landscape is entwined with the beliefs, rituals, customs, and values that give rise to and define the communities that live there. As J.B. Jackson has written, ‘A landscape should establish bonds between people . . . and above all a landscape should contain the kind of spatial organization which fosters such experiences and relationships; spaces for coming together’.2 This social aspect of landscape is currently becoming harder to deny, as the urban blurs into the rural and the prospect of a wilderness or countryside unsullied by human activity dwindles. This chapter investigates the work of two English artists, Andrew K¨otting and Alex Hartley. These artists share a fascination with island and coastal landscapes, but abandon the authority of the disinterested spectator so as to engage with the social geography of such places through time-based media and communications technology.3 The anthropological is no longer repressed in works by these artists. Even when it is just a rugged patch of earth, remote from life, theirs is a landscape marked by human exchange, activity, and intervention. In their work, landscape is the site of community, of movement and migration, of encounters and relationships. It is a space for experimentation with new modes of interactivity, based on participatory and peripatetic modes of practice, which not only reconfigure conventional relationships between the work of art and those who might count as its audience, but between the audience and the landscape. The chief works I shall discuss are K¨otting’s Gallivant and Hartley’s Nowhereisland. Neither is easily summed up, nor even dated. These are not conventional art objects, but projects of a durational sort, which take more than one form. Gallivant is usually presented as a film, which debuted in 1996. Yet this film is the record of another work, a kind of travelling performance that extended over three months in 1995, and which is no less important than the film documenting it. Nowhereisland is even more indeterminate, being a multifaceted and open-ended project that began in 2004, when the artist visited the High Arctic under the sponsorship of the climate-awareness organization Cape Farewell. It is a journey, an action, a sculpture, a conference, a vehicle, a museum, a website, and several events that took place between the

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English Riviera and Bristol during the 2012 Cultural Olympiad – not to mention all the documentation (statements, interviews, criticism, forums, blogs, storybooks, podcasts, photographs, films, animations, doodles) generated by the project. These projects might be called ‘landscape happenings’, in so far as they take their cue from, and take place in, the landscape. ‘Happenings’, as defined by the artist Allan Kaprow in the 1960s, are events that keep the line between art and life so ‘fluid’ that it is no longer meaningful to draw hard divisions between art and its audience.4 Although the artist may set up and facilitate such events, the audience becomes a collaborator in their production. This enables the artist to withdraw authority and develop a more extemporaneous and collective method of working. In privileging the performative and durational side of K¨otting and Hartley’s art, I am by no means implying that their lensbased documentation (in still or moving pictures) is a mere record.5 It is rather that, for the present purposes, I am more interested in discussing what makes these works ‘happenings’, and in drawing out a shift from static representations of landscape towards landscape as a medium for dialogue and exchange. Happenings can be seen as a precedent for much of what was called landscape art or earth art from the mid 1960s onwards. Being impermanent, much of this work was documented using film and photography. However, even though it was staged in the natural or urban environment, audiences were not essential to such work, and rarely became participants in its making. Typically, its audience only came into being when the artist’s lens-based documentation was shown in a gallery. Outside the walls of the art institution, though, their activities harked back to a more solitary – even Romantic – encounter with landscape. In this respect, Gallivant and Nowhereisland might find more of an affinity with Joseph Beuys’s notion of ‘social sculpture’, the main tenet of which is that anyone can take up the role of artist. Yet, while Beuys held such a view, the guru-like persona he adopted ironically served to maintain a barrier between artist and audience. By contrast, the projects on which I focus in the next two sections relinquish authorial control so that others might come to take ownership of them. They thereby reinvent or revive the idea of landscape as a social terrain.

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¨ Andrew Kotting: Gallivant Gallivant, the title of one of K¨otting’s best-known works, not only means to wander or ramble about, but also to mingle, usually with the intention of diverting oneself. It thus combines the ideas of moving around and interacting with others. In Gallivant, the artist tours the coast of Great Britain in a caravan, on a 6,000-mile road trip, in the company of his octogenarian grandmother Gladys and seven-year-old daughter Eden (Fig. 4.1). In the film, these somewhat unlikely travel companions come across as the heroines of the journey. Gladys is very talkative and a little emotional at times, perhaps on account of her husband Albert having just passed away. Eden communicates using a system of hand signs (Makaton) and sounds. This is because she suffers from Joubert syndrome – a neurological disease that is known to reduce a child’s life expectancy substantially. The clockwise journey begins and ends at that beacon of modernist optimism, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. In the language of psychogeography, this journey is a ‘drift’ (d´erive) – one of those anarchic wanderings that interrupts the oppressive spectacle of the everyday and issues instead in fortuitous experiences and encounters, and in a richer sense of the human geography of places. Along the way, the travellers engage in banter with all manner of locals who inhabit the fringes of Britain’s coastline. ‘The local community should always be involved’, K¨otting states, in an absurdist manifesto called the eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent, which uses the inane ‘e-’ prefix of the electronic age to pun with the word ‘earth’, and to mock his own pretensions as a producer of ‘art’ film.6 This desire for the local community to be involved underscores K¨otting’s expanded sense of cinema, wherein landscape and the life that it contains are not just represented but changed by his camera, and by what, at one point in Gallivant, he jestingly calls ‘landscape film-making for the masses’.7 Like other happenings, Gallivant is a one-off event, now only available to watch as a film. Here, the journey is condensed into 99 minutes of footage that was recorded on a Super-8 camera. The film was heavily manipulated during post-production, when the artist experimented with time-lapse, low resolution, montage, jump cuts, soundscaping, audio and voice transposition, and the addition of ‘found’ archival footage of old weather reports and heritage events

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¨ SOCIAL LANDSCAPES: ANDREW KOTTING’S GALLIVANT AND ALEX HARTLEY’S NOWHEREISLAND Figure 4.1 Andrew K¨otting, Word Map of the British Coastline (1996). Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London.

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relating to the places visited. This process exposes the artifice of the documentary genre, but leaves intact the graininess of a ‘road flick’ or ‘home movie’, with its sentimental wish to preserve memories. By using these tricks of the cinematic medium, a particular sense of landscape is cultivated. It is atavistic and animistic, pregnant with folklores, rituals, and traditions that are remembered and recited by local inhabitants, even as they are threatened by the ceaseless processes of nature and the homogenizing pressures of globalization. Post-production does not sap landscape of its energy, but agitates it. Here, and in films like Visionary Landscapes (2004), made up of cuts from Gallivant, landscape moves every bit as much as it is moved through. What comes to the fore in the film, however, is not so much one artist’s vision, but the experiences, outlooks, and sentiments of others. Towards the beginning, the artist’s voiceover (adopting the impersonal tone of documentaries) explains that this trip is ‘a chance to meet people and marvel at the landscape’, to ‘look at the coast through the eyes of different generations’. The artist attempts to look through the eyes of his companions, as well as those of individuals serendipitously encountered and interviewed along the way who make up his ‘found cast’.8 These include, among others, tattooed ex-convicts, elderly lawn bowlers, long-sword dancers, gurners, picnickers, fishermen, a man who has turned the public toilet he looks after into a little museum called the Superloo, a telecommunications engineer, a gardener, a kite-flyer, and an accordionist. Even the police become involved, when they stop to question the artist about what he is doing. Indeed, not everyone is fully at ease with the candour and spontaneity of K¨otting and his crew’s activities, as he himself acknowledges: There was something uncomfortable for other people. Quite often there is when you’re working with members of the public and there is no script and you’re improvising. And I bring my own particular wants and my own bag of curiosities to a public space in my obsession with performance and happenings. I like to kind of fuck around with ‘reality’. But if you’re doing that within a public space and you’re doing it with somebody that’s very old and you’re doing it with somebody that’s severely disabled, the whole thing gets very interesting.9

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Notwithstanding the social dimension of Gallivant, it is also autobiographical and intensely personal. Running throughout this journey is the artist’s awareness of the vulnerabilities of his companions. ‘They were to become its heartbeat and motor’, K¨otting recalls.10 The trip is a metaphor for life’s journey, with the age gap between Eden and Gladys portending the first and last stages of life. The voiceover makes it clear that the purpose is to have a jolly time, but also to ‘spend time together before the opportunity was missed, and perhaps the three of us might have to go our own separate ways’. In a eulogy titled ‘Big Granny and Little Eden’, the author Iain Sinclair (both an occasional collaborator and friend of the artist) reflects: ‘The journey is a memorial, a premature obituary’.11 Signs of impermanence and mortality (memento mori) almost seem scripted into the journey, rather than innocently chanced upon. The sea and the ruins of coastal structures or Neolithic monuments make one conscious of time. In a country churchyard, Gladys and Eden sit reading amid Gothic headstones in a manner that recalls the English tradition of elegiac landscape painting and poetry. If mourning and melancholy have been reproached as pathologies in modern times – things that should be coped with behind closed doors – the various encounters and exchanges in Gallivant (and a later project, In the Wake of a Deadad) revive older, more communal or collective responses to, and rituals around, death. ‘Make the personal a generous filter into the social’, the artist recommends.12 Gallivant is perhaps the first of his projects to question what a shared remembrance or response to the transitoriness of life might be. On the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head, Gladys relates a tale of suicide to German tourists, though they barely comprehend her English. At St Agnes, the family watches a troupe reenacting the myth of the giant Bolster (Fig. 4.2) who bled himself to death for the love of a maiden. At a clootie well in Munlochy, they follow a naked pilgrim (reluctant to be filmed) who has just hung up his clothing, as is the custom of those wishing for a miracle cure for their illness. In Gallivant, as in other of K¨otting’s odysseys to which farcical tasks and public input are integral, the boundary between art and life becomes blurred. Life is identified as a work in progress. The work of art, always unfinished, is identified with life, which remains incomplete up to the point of death. Anticipating what the curator Nato Thompson

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Figure 4.2 Still from Andrew K¨otting’s Gallivant (1996). Image courtesy of BFI and the artist.

calls ‘living as form’, the intimate and fragile relationships that make up life are here the very form (and subject matter) of the work.13 This is evident, too, in In the Wake of a Deadad (which resulted in a film and bookwork of 2006), in which the artist reached out to others for support after his father’s death, as well as in This Our Still Life (2011), a work that originated with Eden’s birth and also led to a film and book.14 In these projects, the encounters and relationships formed are as much a part of the work as the documents they generate. In Gallivant, especially, it is landscape that serves as the medium through which the fragile threads in the web of life become palpable.

Alex Hartley: Nowhereisland As a title, Nowhereisland conjures up the idea of utopia – a fusion of two Greek words (ou-topos and eu-topos) meaning ‘no-place’ and ‘good place’. In the artistic and literary imaginary, utopia is often envisaged as an island whose governance is the epitome of perfection, putting the deplorable political order of one’s own time to shame. The utopianism of Hartley’s project consists in showing up the rhetoric and hypocrisy of those countries that purport to be most representative of progressive democracy, and to provide an ostensibly neutral platform for debates 84

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about how best to address environmental, social, and international crises. It does this through the creation of a floating landscape that serves as the mental anchor for an otherwise dispersed and largely virtual community – indeed, a ‘nation’. This is a community along the lines of other fantastical and idealistic micro-nations. However, it is one that promotes global citizenship and boasts an egalitarian, openaccess ‘Constitution’ that is drafted online by its very own ‘citizens’ at www.nowhereisland.org (Fig. 4.3). Like many nations, Nowhereisland has its origins in voyage, discovery and colonization, all of which are parodied in this work. It began with an expedition to ‘the last land before the North Pole’ in 2004, aboard a century-old schooner owned by Cape Farewell.15 During the voyage, Hartley sighted a small island, newly revealed by the retreat of the Negribreen glacier. Observing that this was ‘a land on which no human had ever stood’, he named it ‘Nymark’ – in Norwegian, ‘new ground’.16 In a makeshift cairn, he placed a tin can containing a ‘claim note’, and had himself photographed standing atop the island’s

¨ SOCIAL LANDSCAPES: ANDREW KOTTING’S GALLIVANT AND ALEX HARTLEY’S NOWHEREISLAND

Figure 4.3 Screenshot of the Nowhereisland website at www.nowhereisland.org (December 2012).

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highest mount, like a land-grabbing explorer from the past. Safely back in England, he wrote to the Polar Institute in Norway to get the island registered on maps. More provocatively, but less successfully, he wrote to the governor of Svalbard to inquire about the island’s sovereignty. This first visit to the Arctic laid the ground for what would soon evolve into a much more complex and collaborative project carried out under the aegis of Situations, an arts commissioning programme based in Bristol. In September 2011, Hartley returned to the island, which had now been renamed Nyskjaeret by Norway. This time, however, he was no longer one among a group of artists and writers, but the leader of an ‘expedition’ for a project that was now being billed as Nowhereisland. On this occasion, the purpose was to remove six tonnes of rock and earth from the island (having acquired permission from Svalbard to do so), tug it into international waters where it could be declared a new nation, and convene roundtables for debating the political constitution that Nowhereisland should adopt, before preparing for the glacial moraine to be transported to England. During one such roundtable on board the ship, the crew drafted the so-called ‘Declaration’, the gist of which proclaims a radical turn away from authoritarian models of governance: Nowhereisland is established in response to the failure of nation states to adequately address interconnected global crises, such as environmental exploitation . . . Nowhereisland seeks to redefine what a nation can be. Nowhereisland embodies the global potential of a new borderless nation, which offers citizenship to all; a space in which all are welcome and in which all have the right to be heard. Nowhereisland’s constitution is and will be cumulative and consensual, open to all citizens and subject to change during the nation’s lifetime. Nowhereisland is a displaced nation journeying south in search of its people.17

According to the Nowhereisland website, ‘this is the first time a nation has been declared by literally displacing its territory – its rocks and soil – from one place, in order that it might exist as a nation on the move’. The question that Hartley asked from the very beginning was: ‘What if a newly revealed, small Arctic island went south in search of a population?’ For enthusiasts of landscape art, this dislodgment of earth will be reminiscent of earth works by Michael Heizer and Robert 86

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Smithson, the latter of whom proposed to tow islands of earth, rock, and glass around harbours, like mobile sculptures. Yet the participatory turn that Nowhereisland took in the lead-up to its ambassadorial tour around the south eastern coast of England suggests a stronger resonance with Beuys’s notion of social sculpture, especially given the democratic and utopian intentions of the latter (Fig. 4.4). In contrast to a notion of landscape as immovable, the ‘migration’ of Nowhereisland from the High Arctic to the English seaside is suggestive of a landscape moving between peoples, recruiting and bringing its citizens together along the way. At the end of its journey in September 2012, citizenship applications had topped 23,000. Among the first citizens were those whom Hartley had invited on his 2011 expedition – present-day counterparts to those natural scientists and artists who accompanied voyages to the ‘New World’ in bygone times. In the present case, however, they were more specialized. They included a human rights lawyer, an environmental activist, a linguistic anthropologist, a psychologist, a geographer, camerapersons, journalists, policy and arts advisors, two students, and a ‘remote adviser’. With these experts on board, Hartley made the decision to surrender some of his authorial

¨ SOCIAL LANDSCAPES: ANDREW KOTTING’S GALLIVANT AND ALEX HARTLEY’S NOWHEREISLAND

Figure 4.4 Nowhereisland welcomed into Newquay Harbor (23 August 2012). Photograph by Joel Robinson.

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control, and to permit a highly intelligent medley of other voices to participate in Nowhereisland, and to chart its direction. Over the course of the 52 weeks leading up to and during the Cultural Olympiad, these and several other individuals – including luminaries from the arts and sciences, as well as educators, activists, and politicians – volunteered as ‘resident thinkers’. They contributed essays, statements, poems, videos, artworks, and other pieces to an expanding interdisciplinary digital archive, heralding the first efforts towards the construction of national identity, in what Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘invention of tradition’, generating in turn what Benedict Anderson has described as an ‘imagined community’.18 Together with the first propositions of the constitution, the discussions generated by these ‘thinkers’ prepared Nowhereisland for its diplomatic tour around south western England. This tour was the high point of the project. A ‘mobile embassy’ travelled around the coast with the island. It doubled as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ displaying objects and documents pertaining to the foundations and future of this island-nation. It stopped at several locations, so as to publicize Nowhereisland and to facilitate exchange between the various communities and groups (schools, bands, educators, choirs, charities, design studios, sports teams, artists’ collectives, festival organizers) that were taking part.

Social Landscapes With their community orientation, Gallivant and Nowhereisland are related to modes of contemporary art that are variously described as ‘interactive’, ‘participatory’, ‘relational’, ‘conversational’ or ‘dialogic’. It might be asked, though, whether such terms signal anything novel. Are they not simply new labels for avant-gardist strategies already deployed by Kaprow or Beuys – or even much earlier in the twentieth century, under the banner of Dada? Are these terms not meaningless or redundant on the grounds that all works of art demand a form of exchange with the viewer?19 In reply, one might say that such terms need to be understood against the backdrop of a jaded narrative of autonomy in modern art. Indeed, apologists for socially engaged art like Nicolas Bourriaud and Grant Kester recommend the abandonment of aesthetic autonomy, of the elitism and exclusivity implicit in this notion, and a closure of the rift between art and life.20 88

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On the other side of this debate, there are the sceptics. Hal Foster, for instance, reproves what he takes to be the pseudo-ethnography (‘social outreach, public relations, economic development and art tourism’) that characterizes much of this work.21 Claire Bishop, perhaps the most vocal opponent of Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, cautions that its ‘feel-good’ ethics do not automatically produce ‘good’ art, and that art put in the service of community dialogue often covers over ideologically fraught antagonism, or manufactures consent instead of allowing a more critical ‘antagonistic’ art to be made manifest.22 In his ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Stewart Martin expands on this bluntly, writing that Bourriaud’s uncritical celebration of a move away from art objects with exchange value towards processes and relations that refer to the social exchange of post-industrial service economies is really little more than a validation of spectacle, an ‘aestheticization of capitalist exchange’.23 My contention is that, despite their explanatory power, such terms fall short in adequately framing an interpretation of works by K¨otting and Hartley. Weighing up the debates between the apologists and critics of such terms, the curator Claire Doherty writes: ‘This polarization of socially engaged practice has been promoted at the expense of a more in-depth analysis of engagement.’24 In other words, one might say that efforts to brand projects like Gallivant and Nowhereisland as exemplary of a trend towards participation in contemporary art risk generalization and ignore other important dimensions of the works, including the precise manner in which publics are engaged. Here, what is crucial is the role of landscape, including the interpersonal exchanges that take place within it; what is interesting are the movements of the artists and their accomplices through real and imagined geographies, or the shifting of landscape itself through different communities. In the peripatetic undertakings of K¨otting and Hartley, landscape is no longer a fixed and passive object that offers itself up to the spectatorial gaze at a sequence of points en route. Rather, it is dynamic and animate, valued as much for its intersecting temporal narratives as for its changing spatial features. Just as their projects cannot be reduced to notions like ‘relational’ or ‘participatory’ art, for fear that other aspects of the work will be elided, neither can they properly be referred to as ‘site-specific’ works. They are not specific to one place, but suggest forms of interactivity that are themselves on the move,

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traversing landscape rather than remaining in one location. To the extent that this is so, it might now be asked: What is the sense of place to which this mobile form of interactivity gives rise? What is the nature of community in these social landscapes? I propose that the social landscapes generated by K¨otting and Hartley do not just reflect or respond to the communities with which they enter into dialogue, but are formative of them. They engender a notion of community as something emergent, incidental, and transitory. In contrast to those more deliberate social configurations called ‘intentional communities’, theirs might better be called ‘unintentional’. ‘Intentional communities’ (communes, cooperatives, eco-villages) are communities where persons come together for a shared purpose, be it political, commercial, or even spiritual. Such communities often seek to redress the individualism, atomization and alienation that they find in normative social structures. Participants do not just opt out of the latter, but seek to replace them with a more collectivist form of existence. K¨otting’s exploration of rural edge-land settlements and Hartley’s fascination with the Drop City hippie experiment in late 1960s Colorado attest to each artist’s interest in the alternative social formations that are intentional communities. But their sympathy with this model is equally marked by misgivings, not least because such communities often rely on coercive mechanisms of some kind in order to maintain order and integrity. The sense of community fostered in and through the kind of audience participation that is so integral to Gallivant and Nowhereisland is arguably different. In an age of increased mobility and interconnectivity, when the values, traditions, and practices that once bound people together in a particular location are said to be waning, and when cultural diversity is threatened by the flattening effects of globalization, forms of community often become precarious, rootless, intangible. In these works, community is not so predetermined and dogged in purpose. Nor is it simply shaped by the landscape that harbours it. Rather, place and community exist in a much more provisional and mutually constitutive relationship. The various interpersonal exchanges in Gallivant map the rich diversity of smaller, localized communities that dot the coastline, building up a portrait of the imagined community that is millennial Britain. But this is a fragmentary portrait of its sundry fringes, its edge-land folk. Here, community is brittle, like shorelines subject to erosion, and no

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less changeable or fleeting than the lives that come in and out of focus. In the Wake of a Deadad, which also puts the performative dimension of K¨otting’s practice into relief, likewise explores the fleetingness of human connections across a range of geographies. Like Gallivant, it takes the form of a film recording a journey undertaken by the artist and those close to him. This time, though, he is accompanied by his daughter and wife Leila, as well as by two saggy inflatable effigies of his deceased father and grandfather; the places visited are mostly outside Britain and of sentimental import to the artist’s paternal line (the remote Faroe Islands, in search of the ‘deadad’s deadad’; the Pyrenees, where the family spends its summer; Los Angeles, to visit one of the artist’s brothers; and Mexican villages, for the Day of the Dead festivities). Like Gallivant, In the Wake of a Deadad is a happening. But it enjoins a more obvious kind of participation by seeking ‘to compile a portrait of him [K¨otting’s father] through the words or marks of other people’.25 Family, colleagues and strangers were invited to respond to photographs of the father at four key stages in his life, including that of his deathbed, in any way they liked. Among the submissions was an envelope with a dead fly, a recording of a song about a lonely funeral called Just Three, a typed-out imaginary conversation with an angel, menacing cartoons, and emotional emails. One contributor forwarded the artist’s invitation to various heads of religious faiths, thus unexpectedly involving other persons. The incitement to share collectively in the process of mourning contravened taboos about death, giving rise to a community no less peculiar than that of Gallivant. The community – or communities – of Hartley’s Nowhereisland also come together in an extemporaneous fashion. The usual criteria that are thought to explain nation-building, such as having a common ethnicity, religion, language, or territory, are irrelevant here. This nation, in so far as it can be called that, is made up of individuals scattered across the globe rather than concentrated in a single location. It is no longer just printed media, but the World Wide Web, that facilitates this imagined community. In the event that they did not experience the floating island and its attendant mobile embassy firsthand, individuals could participate via the website. This is where one applied for citizenship or made contributions to the constitution, or utilised any of the social-networking platforms set up to encourage

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dialogue on issues like nationality, immigration, hospitality, and the environment, not to mention art. Significantly, though, communities were also forged in each of the coastal locations visited by Nowhereisland and its outreach ‘ambassadors’. Nowhereisland belongs to a long utopian tradition. It is an experiment in community that radically redefines citizenship, doing away with borders, passports, and other mechanisms of exclusion. However, unlike other micro-nations with which it is comparable (such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Nutopia manifesto of 1970), this is praxis as much as it is proclamation. For the nation-branding consultant Simon Anholt (writing as the first resident thinker for the project), its critical potential lies in its being a ‘nowherenation’, outside a morally bust system of ‘somewherenations’ that has failed to mitigate social and ecological crises.26 What began as a project sponsored by environmentalists has evolved into a nascent model community whose existence raises questions about the sustainability of present-day geopolitics and the necessity of pursuing alternative, less selfish ways of living together on this floating island called Earth. The social landscapes of K¨otting and Hartley evince a concern not only with community, but with the fragile balance of things in this world, contingent as it is on our relationships to one another and the environment. Neither Gallivant nor Nowhereisland approaches landscape in the manner of the painter who presides over it in a solitary and spectatorial relationship, nor in the manner of ‘land’ artists who manipulate the earth like paint on canvas. Here, community participation fundamentally alters an understanding of landscape and its role in contemporary aesthetic culture. Landscape is neither an objective thing outside of oneself nor something controlled by the gaze. In the work of K¨otting and Hartley, landscape is resistant to forms of representation that leave out the fundamentally social character of place. Instead, landscape is shown to be the very medium of life, affecting and affected by human actions and relationships.

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Jeff Malpas, in Jeff Malpas, ed., ‘Place and the Problem of Landscape’, in The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), p. 6. Malpas takes his cue, in large part, from W.J.T. Mitchell’s

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classic study Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), which redefines landscape as a ‘medium’ through which forms of social exchange are represented and indeed constructed, and not simply as something to be contemplated – not merely the ‘genre’ of visual art as construed in more conventional treatments such as that of Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949). J.B. Jackson, ‘Learning about Landscapes’, in J.B. Jackson, The Necessity of Ruins and other Topics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 16–7. Andrew K¨otting (b. 1959) is an artist whose work moves between performance, installation, animation, text, video and film, usually outside the walls of the gallery, and in collaboration with other artists, musicians and writers, as well as family members. He is professor of time-based media at the University for the Creative Arts (United Kingdom), and is represented by the Black Shed Gallery in East Sussex. Gallivant was first shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and won the Channel 4 prize for Best New Director. Alex Hartley (b. 1963) is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, installation, and photography. He first won critical acclaim at the Royal Academy’s 1997 Sensation exhibition, has exhibited at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery and Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and is represented by the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. Nowhereisland was one of 12 ‘Artists Taking the Lead’ projects for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad funded by the Arts Council of England. Allan Kaprow, Excerpt from ‘Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (1959–61)’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 720. Andrew K¨otting has spoken of expanded cinematic experience, referring to the artist Joseph Beuys’s ‘expanded conception of art’, and possibly Gene Youngblood’s book Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), in which the media theorist writes: ‘Expanded cinema is not a movie at all: like life, it’s a process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind’ (p. 41). Andrew K¨otting, ‘eArthouse declaration of spurious intent’, The Guardian, 2 November 2001. Gallivant, DVD, directed by Andrew K¨otting (London: BFI Video publishing, 2005). Unless otherwise stated, all future quotations from or relating to Gallivant are extracted from the film. Claire Smith, ‘Traveling Light: New Art Cinema in the 90s’, in Robert Murphy, ed., British Cinema of the 90s (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), p. 151.

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Gary Thomas, ‘Interview: Andrew K¨otting Talks to Gary Thomas’, Ape Engine, July 2010, p. 6. Available at www.apengine.org/wp-content/ plugins/as-pdf/generate.php?post=5273. (accessed 1 March, 2011) Andrew K¨otting, ‘Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea’, in Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris, eds, Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 46. Iain Sinclair, ‘Big Granny and Little Eden’, Gallivant (DVD Booklet) (London: BFI Video Publishing, 2005), unpaginated. Quoted in Andrew K¨otting and Gareth Evans, ‘Andrew K¨otting – What He Does, How He Does It and the Context in which It Has Been Done: An Alphabetarium of K¨otting’, in Jackie Hatfield, ed., Experimental Film and Video (New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2006), p. 128. See Nato Thompson, ed., Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991– 2011 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). Andrew K¨otting, This Our Still Life [Nos Natures Mortes Ici], (BadBLoOd&siBYL, 2011). See Alex Hartley, ‘Nowhereisland: A Message to all Nowherians on Christmas Day’, at nowhereisland.org/#!/resident-thinkers/16/. (accessed 15 July, 2012) Alex Hartley, ‘Nymark (Undiscovered Land)’, in Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change (London: Cape Farewell, 2006), p. 13. ‘Nowhereisland’, at nowhereisland.org/#!/citizenship/declaration. All future quotations about Nowhereisland, unless otherwise noted or attributable to specific authors, are taken from the relevant sections of this website. (accessed 20 August, 2012) Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See, for instance, David Novitz, ‘Participatory Art and Appreciative Practice’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59: 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 153–65. Here, Novitz makes the point that ‘the rise of nonparticipatory art . . . is a comparatively recent phenomenon that distorts our theories of what art is’ (p. 153). It is only due to the modernist notion of autonomy – which suggests an artificial division between the aesthetic object and the spectator’s passive contemplative gaze – that it now makes sense to identify a so-called participatory art. The most debated texts advancing the case for these new tendencies and terms are Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du r´eel, 1998), and Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and

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Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’, in Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 307. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall, 2004), pp. 51–79. For a more recent critical overview, see Claire Bishop ‘Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?’, in Thompson, Living as Form, pp. 34–45. Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Third Text 21: 4 ( July 2007), pp. 369–86. Claire Doherty, ‘Nowhereisland: Embassy – Art – Participation’, at nowhereisland.org/#!/embassy/art/participation. (accessed 21 July, 2012) Andrew K¨otting, In the Wake of a Deadad (Canterbury, Farnham, Maidstone, and Rochester: University College for the Creative Arts, 2006), p. 243. Simon Anholt, ‘Nowhereisland’, at nowhereisland.org/resident-thinkers/ 1. (accessed 20 July, 2012)

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5 I Am Equipment : Artist as Interface Josh Ginsburg

Following a Rule

Figure 5.1 Walkabout, 2011. Event still, Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town. Photograph by Jonx Pillemer.

Rather than entering into critical engagement with interactive art practices, this text presents Walkabout, an artwork that employs 97

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participation as a strategy for rendering private thought processes public.1 Tracing aspects of the project’s evolution, the text begins with a discussion of the act of private thinking. Considering the nature and dynamics of thoughts, it then moves to explore the forms, structures, and challenges of their storage and rendering. This leads, in turn, to a description of the emergence and logic of a digital archive of thoughts – the hypermedia system that I have created and that lies at the core of Walkabout. Positioned as a tactical framework to structure, promote, and facilitate engagement with the world, the archive and its subsidiary processes are then discussed in the context of communication and performance. Language is central to my practice in art. In part, I approach it from a philosophical perspective, probing the relation between my perception of the world and the conceptual apparatus I employ to engage it. In other ways, language manifests itself as a medium through spoken exchange, where conversation is imagined as jazz-like improvisations. But the act of writing poses its own challenge to the aims of this chapter. Assembling words and ideas in a fixed order – attempting to stabilize or ground thoughts – is in stark opposition to the impulse of Walkabout, where the general inclination has been to keep ideas evolving and in flight. However, what has been at stake throughout this challenge of writing are questions central to the project as a whole: What is the relationship between a purely private cognitive event and its articulation in the world for public consumption? What is gained and lost as ideas are transposed through material, be it steel, sound, written words, or other media? What does thought look and feel like? The images embedded in this text, most of which are day-to-day photographs from my cell phone, were collected from my archive as a response to the challenge of writing. They were chosen on impulse according to associations that arose while writing and without the expectation of a defined relation to the text. Although seemingly insignificant, or at least supplementary, this is noted here as an allusion to the character of the project. Ideally, the associative logic of the images and their proximity to written ideas should facilitate the formation of unexpected relationships, providing the expression of something other than that which I have been able to say in writing and to be shown through the process of reading.

I AM EQUIPMENT : ARTIST AS INTERFACE Figure 5.2 From Walkabout archive: fragment on studio wall from letter by Robert Morris to John Cage in 1962. In the letter Morris proposed a new work then titled The Box with the Sound of Making Inside.

Walkabout The title Walkabout is borrowed from the common use of the word within the context of fine art to denote the guided discussion of an artwork, often led by the artist, while in the presence of it. Walkabout is in one sense just that, but it involves no walking and there are no material objects in the exhibition space to which the discussion points. Rather, the artwork to which Walkabout refers occupies an essentially mental space of ideas. Predicated on the exploration of thoughts as things, Walkabout remains immaterial and constantly in flux. As I will explore below, Walkabout comprises experiments with various forms of interpersonal engagement. Each rule-bound event situates me as an interface to the ephemeral artwork. Participants are encouraged to engage me in conversation, to which I respond with digitally projected images, video, text, audio, and voice. Mediating each participatory encounter is a personal digital archive comprising ± 30,000 discrete digital elements (text, video, still, and sound) that I have collected or made over a three-year period. Each media fragment corresponds to a thought, moment, or experience, and is valued principally as a mnemonic – a trigger or path to a transitory 99

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thought event – rather than as an object for prolonged aesthetic contemplation. A highly idiosyncratic tagging or digital annotation system, rigorously applied to the complete archive, arranges the data fragments in a complex and dynamic network: a swirling, evolving ecosystem of ideas. The associative logic underpinning its complex and amorphous architecture facilitates my immediate access to elements through both formal and oblique references. Responding to engagement by speaking through the media, I fluidly navigate the network and select artefacts to show and discuss. The ability to find these artefacts and share them in real time acts as a form of nuanced gesture that, like body language, can facilitate communication.

Figure 5.3 Walkabout with Kathryn Smith, 2011, serialworks, Cape Town. Photograph by Jonx Pillemer.

In addition to the media fragments that I deliberately seek out, and as a function of the database’s networked and associative design, related or oblique fragments become present during searches. Effectively sidetracking the search, these unexpected fragments become points of departure for conversation. Each staging is thereby unique – relying on the detours and contingencies of participants and on the act of searching. 100

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Following a conception of meaning as emergent and contingent on a specific, temporally defined community of language users, Walkabout manifests or shows itself temporarily as a function of the specific interaction between the participants and me. In this way, the artwork itself emerges in response to engagement and questioning. To date, variations of Walkabout have been staged in a range of contexts – from one-on-one conversations in studios, offices or homes, to performance-presentations during seminars and conferences, to cinematic renderings in theatres and music halls. Each event frames a shared search for an artwork that is at once present and elusive: present in its staging as a performance as well as the staging of the search itself, and elusive through candid engagement with the challenge of its realization. Within the framework of the event, limited by a defined duration, the cacophony of thoughts directed at the work effectively comprises it. Each event thereby sustains an uncertain space between the artwork and its description.

Figure 5.4 Conversations Two, 2011. Video still, Arena Theatre, Cape Town.

Living and working productively with uncertainty is at the philosophical centre of this project. The events provide defined durations of heightened interaction between me, the archive, and the public, in which the space of uncertainty can be indulged and explored. Ultimately, the proposition that motivates experimentation is that 101

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 5.5 What We Speak About when We Speak About Art, 2010. Screenshot from video performance at Dadasouth? symposium, Iziko Musuem, Cape Town.

calm is found in the acceptance of complexity – or, in the words of Koyr´e as cited by J.M Coetzee, when we ‘become reconciled to the ununderstandable’.2

Thought Acts Walkabout emerged from my interest in thought as describing the private and internal operations of the mind. More directly, it denotes ways in which ideas are formed, stored, or recalled, and how they evolve. This interest was fostered in part by my growing anxiety associated with incomplete, unrealized ideas hoarded and lying dormant in piles of notebooks in cupboards, or nested in files deep on a hard drive. In response, hoping to inspire or necessitate the resolution of these unfinished thoughts, I had effectively begun to resist new imaginings. This logic was, however, largely ineffectual, like scooping handfuls of water from the hull of a rapidly sinking boat. 102

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A more constructive response to the problem appeared partly through an encounter with the artist George Brecht’s ‘Event Scores’ of the 1960s, comprising short instructional texts on cards. As Julia Robinson explains, ‘simply to read an Event Score and reflect upon it without acting, already constitutes an adequate realization’.3 Rather than perceiving an idea as the mere potential for a future embodiment, what if the idea itself were fully realized simply by being privately conjured up in thought?

Figure 5.6 From Walkabout archive: image of mini-bus taxis at intersection of Twist and Plain streets in Johannesburg inner city, South Africa. Photographed from Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Plasticienne, 2010. Image published courtesy of Kreutzfeldt and Les e´ ditions de l’œil.

In The Stranger, Albert Camus writes of a prisoner who bides his time by navigating memories of his old room, always deepening the detail of the memory with finer characteristics (the objects, their cracks, scratches, and so on). As the protagonist remarks, ‘the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had only lived one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison.’4 In addition to the sense of calm rather than anxious recollection, there seemed to me 103

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something sustainable (and desirable) about fulfilment born of quiet and private mental activities. Further, an opportunity appeared to exploit my inclination for reflection by turning thinking into journeying, journeying that could be achieved perfectly independently and without material obstruction. To this effect, Martin Heidegger poetically writes that ‘to think is to be underway’.5

Figure 5.7 From Walkabout archive: ‘Thinking makes it so – Willem Boshoff’. Quoted from presentation by Boshoff at Dadasouth? symposium, Iziko Musuem, Cape Town, 2008.

The combination of the above ideas triggered a shift in my interest from the essentially public manifestation of ‘finished’ ideas, works, or thoughts, to the private process of thinking itself as an activity – where ‘to think’ is ‘to do’.

Disorder The whole universe interests me. George Brecht6

Returning to the ‘unfinished’ ideas of my notebooks, now conceived differently as fragmented and haphazard articulations of thought, I 104

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observed that the prohibitively closed or obstructive structures of their storage remained a problem. The stacking or nesting structures that had restricted access to the ideas as things to be completed were, in a sense, also restricting the capacity of each idea to perform freely across contexts, to act and interact. Notes on till slips, on my phone, on my hand; books of writing, sketches, conversations, photos, and videos – all appeared isolated from one another, passive, and static. I began looking for ways to mobilize already documented ideas – to liberate, for example, a written note from the confines of a single page covered by other pages, and again by other books. For the ideas to mature, the articulations in the various media needed freedom of movement, to make contact with one another.

Figure 5.8 From Walkabout archive: ‘How to collect thoughts?’

In a short story entitled ‘The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away’, Ilya Kabakov writes that a garbage dump ‘not only devours everything, preserving it forever, but one might say it also continuously generates something’.7 The dump ‘generates’ as a function of its inherent chaos: objects born of entirely different contexts are jumbled together, without category or hierarchy, allowing relationships continually to form and separate. From one perspective a heap may seem to be a tomb. From another, it is an incubator or a greenhouse breathing life into its objects, providing them with the opportunity to connect with others and to be repurposed. The heap itself thereby becomes a dynamic living system, creating precisely by virtue of its propensity to disorder. If I had applied the logic of a garbage heap to my notebooks by cutting all of the notes into independent elements and jumbling them together, interesting relationships created by chance would indubitably have occurred. However, this process would also mean abandoning useful organizational principles inherent in the structure of the notebooks themselves. The chronology, for example, would be disassembled, and thus the ability to find a note by date or to determine 105

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its context within a broader timeline. In this example, because of the notebook’s material substance, the potential yields of chaos and order, or of chaos and stasis, are mutually exclusive. On a practical level, the flexibility of a digital system comprising digitized notes offers a solution, enabling ideas to move and shift without losing an embedded history of their overall trajectory. One could digitally ‘throw’ the notes into a heap, mess them about, build relationships and new ideas – and then, with the click of a button, have them snugly back in their original place in the digital notebook, with all the desirable properties intact. The key feature of the digital system is its capacity to employ the powerful agent of disorder without undermining other important structures.

Figure 5.9 From Walkabout archive: Cup and Wheel, 2012.

Emergence While an undergraduate engineering student, I encountered mathematical models that deliberately inject random elements into orderly, logical systems. The particular models to which I am referring, called 106

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‘genetic algorithms’, fall within the broader study of ‘complex adaptive systems’. Complex adaptive systems comprise strategies that look to harness the haphazard element inherent in complex systems, rather than trying to filter it out as an uncontrollable or destructive force. They are predicated on the emergence of solutions from within a process, as opposed to the imposition of a solution derived from rigorous analysis alone. In the same way that notes thrown into a disorderly mess make it possible for otherwise dislocated concepts to merge constructively, random components within a rigorous logic provide the opportunity to shortcut the process of finding a solution.

Figure 5.10 From Walkabout archive: experiment with a notebook design that allows notes to be jumbled and then easily returned to principal order.

Axelrod and Cohen consider the application of an ‘emergent strategy’ to a process through a discussion of ‘exploitation’ and ‘exploration’. Introduced as strategies for harnessing complexity, ‘exploration’ refers to a variety of approaches to a given problem, while ‘exploitation’ refers to the expansion of a particular trend that has shown promise. Too much exploration – which they term ‘eternal boiling’ (as in the case of boiling water) – means that the system remains in permanent disorder, and any ‘potentially valuable structures 107

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are broken apart before they can be effectively put to use’.8 In contrast, too much exploitation is termed ‘premature convergence’. This occurs when an idea is pursued or exploited before a sufficiently wide variety of potentially more effective options has been generated. Complex adaptive systems possess the capacity to balance the proportion of exploration and exploitation by virtue of feedback mechanisms. Effectively ‘managing’ a symbiotic relationship between order and chaos, these systems are essentially iterative, self-correcting processes of action, reflection, and adaptation.

Figure 5.11 From Walkabout archive: ‘Rule Maker, Outcome Evaluator, Random Performer’. Conceived of as a model for the artist as complex dynamic system.

Consider the case of the digital system of notes discussed above, in which components are able effortlessly to fragment, jumble, and reassemble. Employing the strategy outlined above would mean reflecting on the chance relationships that occur in the fragmentation phase, and, if relevant combinations occur, exploiting them to form relational networks. In practice, these networks would become memory maps of fleeting encounters between notes. To reiterate the achievements within this form of imagining, the digital system no longer hosts notes of singular, concretized value dependent on ordered positioning. Nor are the notes stripped of any 108

I AM EQUIPMENT : ARTIST AS INTERFACE Figure 5.12 Francis Burger, Action Reflection Diagram, 2012. Graphic. Dimensions variable. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

contextual meaning through total chaos. Rather, they exist in flux between these two states, empowered to act, to generate meaning, through their interaction. Enabling the collapse of a fixed hierarchy imposed from above, the digital system creates the opportunity for any note – even those that initially seem insignificant – to contribute to the emergence of other thoughts as groups or as paths. With only a sense of the work as an adaptive system (with the capacity to grow through feedback and measured exploitation), my attraction to emergent strategies thus inspired the development of a digital, networked, and archival process for the generation, retrieval, and communication of thoughts. Reaching back to the anxiety described above, I felt that, if I could build a system that not only stored ideas, but created as a function of them, I would be encouraged to have further ideas. That is, I would be encouraged to engage openly with the world around me in the knowledge that my sporadic and haphazard thoughts (materializing in notes of one media or another) were directly or indirectly causing the system to evolve, and not simply propagating mental noise.

The Private Joy of Seeing the World Giving traction to this line of thinking is the work of artist and philosopher John Cage and, as a prime example, his musical composition 4 33 . Its score instructs performers not to make any intentional 109

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sounds, but to sit silently for four minutes and 33 seconds. The ambient sound of the performance space – shuffling agitated audiences, chairs creaking, wind, electrical hum, breathing or coughing – stands in for and becomes the composition. Like much of Cage’s work, 4 33 deflects the pointed attention normally reserved for art to the everyday.9 I find two aspects of this work particularly appealing. The first is the derivation of a structure (a score) that, when performed, frames and invigorates the mundane. The second is the capacity to apply that structure outside its formal performance as an artwork – to stand in the street, for example, and listen to the traffic as if it were a composition. In this case the artwork acts like a philosophical aphorism or maxim, framing and thereby enabling interaction with the world.

Figure 5.13 Allora and Calzadilla, Returning a Sound, 2004.

In an interview for Audio Arts, John Cage asks his interviewer: ‘How do you feel about [Ludwig] Wittgenstein saying that beauty has no meaning and it just means that it clicks with us, that is to say, we approve of it?’10 Cage further recounts Wittgenstein’s suggestion that one simply keep a ‘clicker’ in one’s pocket, mechanically making something beautiful by clicking.11 Like the framework of Cage’s 4 33 , Wittgenstein’s clicker operates as a conceptual tool, augmenting 110

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experience of the world by facilitating or framing experience as an engagement or encounter. Counteracting the habit and familiarity of the everyday, both of these tools facilitate a private joy in seeing the world. Mapping the logic of both 4 33 and Wittgenstein’s Clicker, Walkabout’s principal function is to provide a framework that simultaneously inspires, records, and maintains the emergence of ideas as an activity, allowing its user to ‘look through it to the world beyond’.12

Figure 5.14 Jared Ginsburg, Hoist, 2011. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

Strategies for Searching Infinite Spaces Wittgenstein wrote that ‘philosophy ought only to be written as a form of poetry’.13 This is a gesture to a powerful symbiotic relationship between logic and poetics working together to express what neither might necessarily achieve alone. In a certain sense, the dynamic suggested by Wittgenstein’s proposition reflects my sustained interest in emergent systems. As discussed above, emergent systems possess the capacity to harness contingency by pairing the apparently dissimilar systems of rigorous logic and random deviations within one closed system. To a large extent, the appeal of this pairing functions on the level of a sense or impression of this symbiotic 111

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 5.15 From Walkabout archive: Nuts on Block in Studio, 2012.

Figure 5.16 From Walkabout archive: Finding Wittgenstein’s Clicker, Wits University, 2011. This shutter release was found on the floor and kept in my jacket pocket to privately ‘capture’ moments by clicking. 112

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process. It encompasses both the predictable trot of logic and the wild roaming of uncertainty, working together as an ‘odd couple’. I conceive my own exploration in the image of Wittgenstein’s suggestion, albeit with an inverted emphasis. I use art as a tool for enquiry, a piece of equipment to probe the world. Through its use I hope to achieve an augmented awareness that can facilitate my living it. In this respect, the process of art-making is, for me, a form of philosophical wandering – a constant and non-hierarchical interplay of action, feedback, and reflection.

Figure 5.17 Barend de Wet, Douglas Gimberg, and Christian Nerf, Act 038 (Acting on Orders), c. 2008.

But how can one sustain a wandering that acknowledges the constructive potential of uncertainty (intrinsic to an emergent strategy) that is nevertheless also mindful of the psychological implications of aimless meandering? Consider, for example, the case of the librarians in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (1962). The library that Borges imagines comprises all possible combinations of letters inscribed in an infinite number of 410-page books. The result is a labyrinthine library of all past, present, and future knowledge. The complete story of one’s life, for example, is neatly transcribed in a book 113

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somewhere on a shelf. Yet what the library gains in expanse it sacrifices in legibility and functionality. For every text in the library, there exists an infinite number of near perfect facsimiles: texts with subtle, even minute variations (differences of single letters or words). Finding a true text, one that accurately (or at least functionally) describes states of affairs in the world, is rendered all but impossible, beset by falsity and randomness, shapes without meaning.

Figure 5.18 From Walkabout archive: ‘Template’.

Borges describes one desperate strategy employed by the librarians: if all texts exist, a book exists comprising the locations of all the information one might require – a book of directions, a map or an index: ‘to locate Book A, consult first a Book B which indicates A’s position; to locate Book B consult first a Book C, and so on to infinity . . . ’.14 Infinity ultimately plagues the librarians; they trawl the labyrinth, haphazardly reaching for the shelves, pulling out books, and despondently returning them to continue a life of looking with 114

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little in the way of finding. How then could the librarians somehow find peace in their journeys? What could soothe their state of mind?

Figure 5.19 From Walkabout archive: Keys at a flea market, Venice, 2010.

Pyrrhonism is an ancient Greek philosophy, credited as the foundation of scepticism and based on the impossibility of certain knowledge. The proposition is, therefore, that happiness or contentment is only available through the acceptance of that fact. As Lance Herman explains, the Pyrrhonic sceptic reminds himself always that he does not know; and so remains always in a state of inquiry, searching for knowledge but not admitting of knowledge, philosophizing without end, hoping, if for nothing else, that his incessant philosophical wandering might congeal into a satisfying form of life: that he may make peace with himself as a questing mind that will not find peace.15

What if it were possible to convince Borges’s librarians of this method? Would the repositioning of their function from the need to find something particular enable them to give up their impossible 115

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search for either Book C, Book B, or Book A? If, for example, value could be found in the act of reaching for a book, in searching itself, then perhaps they could be energized to continue without despondence. Importantly, the imposition of this process is not, in fact, in opposition to the process already underway. The book that they were hoping for may still end up in their laps, but they will not wait in desperation for it to arrive. This is perhaps the essence of Walkabout’s ambition. The rule, or intention placed at the helm of the emergent process: to prize indeterminate searching as an end in itself, and to be alert to what might (but equally might not) emerge from the process.

Figure 5.20 Book of Babel, 2008. Hiddingh Hall, Cape Town.

The System As I have already indicated, the database consists of ± 30,000 discrete digital elements (still, video, text and sound) that I have collected or made. The database is primarily accessed through, and made accessible by, a freely downloadable Google product called Picasa. On entry into the database, each element is annotated through Picasa with an array of keywords. These digital annotations are called tags, and are embedded 116

I AM EQUIPMENT : ARTIST AS INTERFACE Figure 5.21 Francis Burger, The Indulgence and Exhaustion of the Meaningless Voice: BA1-BB102 (detail), 2008–10. Photographic collage. Dimensions variable. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

in the architecture of the image file itself as metadata. Images are thereby searchable in terms of their tags, as well as by their file names and other technical data, such as their date of creation or modification, or occasionally geographical information. It is useful to consider tags as a set of tentacles, each extending from an image file. Connecting equivalent tentacles of individual image files to one another establishes relational networks. These networks allow complex relationships to emerge between elements without the need for assortments of images in separate folders or duplicates of files across a hard drive. Through image collection and management software platforms like Picasa, tags are popularly used to identify names of people in images, or large categories such as ‘landscape’, ‘portrait’, and so on. A distinctive 117

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aspect of my process is the willingly idiosyncratic, associative, and subjective tagging of files that enter the database. This intensified tagging process was impelled by the recognition that, when looking for something (a specific image from a camping trip up the west coast, for example), many oblique details come to mind (a tyre that burst on the way up, a birthday party missed while there, an orange tent) without assisting whatsoever in finding the image in question. Considering the heterogeneous combinations of images, words, names, sounds, and places that occur in the mind’s eye when recalling or thinking about something (the colour of a jersey worn by someone whose name is lost to memory, for example), I began embedding oblique references in image files. Instituted as a mandatory process, this tagging methodology mimics to some extent what appeared to me to be the mechanics of my memory.

Figure 5.22 From Walkabout archive: plug network in Paul Ressel’s studio, 2008.

By exploiting the collection of formal and oblique references embedded in them as metadata, this idiosyncratic tagging process (born of associations that arise through my engagement with each 118

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element) facilitates my immediate access to the disparate elements. Rather than scrolling through nested folders, often to frustrating deadends, searching in this framework takes the form of honing in on the target by using as many associations as necessary. In opposition to the hierarchical filing systems that characterize most personal digital archives, the result is a dynamic archive with subjective association as its organizing principle. Fortuitously, archived elements with common tags form virtual collections that are not necessarily manually collated, but that selforganize based on conceptual ‘family resemblances’.16 Although I am solely responsible for tagging each element in the database (giving it valency, an ability to react with others), the collections themselves form with relative autonomy.

Figure 5.23 From Walkabout archive: Pippa Skotnes’s office library with books arranged by colour. This allows searching for a book based on a memory of its cover.

In addition to enjoying immediate accessibility, I am also able to wander through the space of the archive, noting the emergence of new groups, monitoring the appearance of certain elements in proximity to others, or simply touring the elements themselves. 119

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The system is thus a networked database that both stores and generates ideas. Its construction is based on the powerful but deceptively simple investment in the highly idiosyncratic process of tagging its contents. The result is a massive jumble that is also eminently navigable.

Figure 5.24 Jared Ginsburg, untitled photograph, 2011. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

To Think and Speak Clearly When I walk around the reservoir in the morning, or drive my car through the city, there is often a sense of clarity to my thoughts, a clarity that frustratingly escapes me when I sit down and attempt to capture it in writing. Walkabout offers an alternate strategy for collecting such fleeting thought propagations by combining the immediacy with which detailed data can be transmitted through image and the immediacy with which I can access the appropriate images. Using the system, I am able effectively to track some of these seemingly frictionless trains of thought through sequences of images collected while thinking, like a kind of image sentence. 120

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But this should not imply that I could neatly articulate or translate these thought sequences into text or speech alone. Just as one could follow a trail of breadcrumbs dropped during a walk in a forest without necessarily being able to recount their path, I am able to trace the thought only through ‘reading’ the images. This observation ultimately led me to question the difference in character between what I can think and what I can say. The fact that I can recount a thought allows me to validate its logic, yet I am still unable to ‘say’ it – that is, to publicize what it means to me. Aside from the potential ability of the system to mimic, albeit crudely, the character of thought, this question has a bearing on the way in which my language influences what I can and cannot articulate.

Figure 5.25 From Walkabout archive: ‘Reservoir walks’.

Consider the case outlined by J.M. Coetzee in his essay ‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’. When Newton first publicly proposed the concept of gravitational force, his use of the word ‘attract’ largely undermined his discovery owing to its resonance with the occult. His discovery was, as a result, considered a regression from the empirical mode championed by the modern scientist. Without the language to describe his thought accurately, 121

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Newton (as is now commonplace in science) imported the word ‘attract’, re-contextualizing and augmenting its definition in order to offer insight into this new concept. Coetzee describes this wordborrowing as a sign of ‘wrestling to make the thought fit into the language, to make the language express the thought, [or] perhaps even of an incapacity of language to express certain thoughts, or of thought unable to think itself out because of the limitations of the medium’.17 Further, he wonders whether Newton might have been able to do ‘better justice to his thoughts . . . if he had worked in a linguistic medium radically different from Latin or English’.18

Figure 5.26 From Walkabout archive: lino blocks printed into notebook, Artist Proof Studios, Johannesburg, 2011.

In light of such gaps and ‘wrestling matches’ between media of meaning, I have come to think of the networked database as a language system of some kind, constituted by discrete images (words) and software (grammar), that allows me to do better justice to my thoughts. But to what extent can this process of mapping thought sequences through the extensive use of images be used to exploit images for the purposes of public or even simply interpersonal communication? 122

. . . artists think the same way chess players think. You know, they have a set number of rules, they make an exhaustive search about probabilities, the way the chessboard is set up. They say: ‘Well I can make a move here, a move here, this is bad, this might be good.’ They push it two or three moves further and they say: ‘Aha, this is what I will do.’ This is what recursion is. And it’s . . . it’s really the whole basis of problem solving. Jack Burnham19

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What We Speak About when We Speak About Art

Many of the significant developments that have occurred within the Walkabout process have been experienced as a kind of conversation with myself. Perhaps the most significant challenge of this project has therefore been the search for a suitable form in which to render it public. What form would not undermine the evolving, transitory, and dynamic characteristics that are its principles? What form could present its pursuit of quiet, of privacy, and of independence? What form could account for the intrinsically un-shareable affair of thought? How

Figure 5.27 Protocol, 2010. Dynamic installation (a conversation between a fan and a computer), Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town. 123

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 5.28 Research Art, Magic Sand (performed for The Proposal Project). 2011. Video still. Dimensions variable. Image provided courtesy of the artists.

could the integrity of the experiment, to search without prioritizing a resolved end, survive its output? As embodied by the above questions, the threats of compromise and contradiction appeared to pressure this project from all sides. As a result, it operated for prolonged periods in opposition to the idea of exhibition, or of public display of one kind or another. The project was instead focused on strategies designed to facilitate my own engagement with the world. Strategies that, when stretched, would treat as part of their task the alleviation of the need to speak publicly. In consequence, the process has encouraged negating physical material and prioritizing flux and quiet wherever possible, in an effort to value thoughts on their own terms. However, despite the propulsion towards a perfectly private art, I did feel motivated by the prospect and challenge of exhibiting the act of thinking while still remaining in harmony with the underlining rules of the process. Like the performance of musical notes, thoughts are allusive and temporal. They occur within a process, and their residue remains suggestive. How then could an artwork, taking form in the fabric of thinking, be presented? Witnessing the successful performance of the system as a means to capture my own streaming thoughts (a conversation with myself), 124

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I began to take note of contexts that managed to replicate some of the conditions of experiencing thought. The domain of event, of activities characterized by their fleeting nature within defined parameters, presented a fertile solution space. It felt possible to move through a process with a real-time performance framework – effectively holding and making manifest an artwork within the realm of ideas.

Figure 5.29 Christian Nerf. Plantsculpture (2002 – ongoing). Photograph by Brett Rubin. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

Furthermore, I became alert and attracted to a particular moment in an artwork’s lifecycle: its explanation, or discussion in public – the act of speaking about it. Seminars, panel discussions, artists talks, walkabouts and other similar forums appeared as opportunities to conflate the representative discussion of an artwork with its own creation: in other words, to make or manifest the work in the realm of idea by speaking about it. Interestingly, my conflict with exhibitions was similarly reconciled with the above solution. The performance of the system as an event did not compromise the fluidity of my personal communicative relationship with it, and generated a host of interactive possibilities. The result was that performance of the system became a space for the system to show itself, if not my own thoughts. I was thereby 125

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 5.30 From Walkabout archive: man searching for lost precious metals (coins etc.), Camps Bay beach, Cape Town, video still.

able to share something that I felt invested in offering, a potentially empowering tool or strategy that had helped me find degrees of calm in the complex, often overwhelming field of ideas, of media, and of life.

Figure 5.31 From Walkabout archive: ‘Use it, its art’ [sic]. 126

Public presentation of Walkabout fed directly into a practical exploration of the event framework as a performance, exhibition, or shared space for the system. Three modes – the presentational, the cinematic, and the conversational – developed, and ultimately shaped, this exploration. Each of these modes relies on my presence as an interface to the system and the project as a whole.

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I Am Equipment

Figure 5.32 From Walkabout archive: Operating Theatre, Pathology Laboratory, University of Cape Town.

The presentational mode explores the opportunity for images to enhance communication as a function of real-time access to them. In this respect the networked database is a tool that acts like a memory and like a voice: a memory, in that elements can be recorded and recalled speedily and accurately; and a voice, in that the combinations of elements allow me to speak through the media. The aim of the presentation is the exploration of ways in which thought is articulated. In contrast to the presentational mode, the cinematic mode explores the development of thoughts. Navigating the database as if navigating 127

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my own mind, I allow elements to collide and combine during freeassociative tours, in search of what uncertainty might yield. The emphasis of this part of the inquiry is improvisation, striving to enhance the capacity to release thought into unencumbered action. The cinematic mode aims both to create and to play a visual instrument, and, in so doing, to construct a cinema of ideas.

Figure 5.33 From Walkabout archive: Elements of a Pocket Watch, Nina Liebenberg’s Studio.

The conversational mode is a hybrid of the cinematic and presentational modes; it attempts to explore and augment the improvisational quality of conversation. Invested in the manner in which ideas are generated through exchange and interaction, the system is employed within this mode to prompt and record conversational journeys. Aside from the private journeying of my own thoughts, for which the database is principally designed, a ‘performance’ of Walkabout situates me as an interface with the ongoing artwork through the application of these three modalities. During rule-bound interactions, I present ideas to the audience pertaining to the work’s construction, tour the digital network, and give participants the opportunity to engage with me. I respond with the digital projection of elements from 128

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the database – images, videos, texts and audio clips – as well as with my own voice in conversation. By fielding questions related to the work’s own making, I aim to make manifest the imagining of its form. My overt presence in the performance of Walkabout – both physically and vocally – is a function of two principal issues. The first is that the same idiosyncratic tagging that facilitated the fluent navigation of the networked idea space made it all but impossible for anyone other than myself to use it effectively. Exploiting subjective relations empowered the system, but necessitated my control of it. The second is that the artwork is a process. Various imagined ways of making the process available while it is still in motion (other than by inviting people into it) have inevitably felt inadequate. Thereby implicated in the work as a real-time component of it, I was encouraged to negotiate my specific role in the interaction. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger wrote on how objects can ‘presence’ or ‘withdraw’ from view as a function of their application in a given context. When a hammer, for example, is held in hand and thrust through the air to strike a nail, Heidegger suggests that it is equipment – ‘withdrawn’ as an extension of the body. He terms this position ‘ready-to-hand’. When the hammer is placed on the table it ‘presences’ as an object with physical properties of its own. It is ‘present-at-hand’.20 In 2010, Marina Abramovi´c performed The Artist is Present at MoMA in New York, as part of a retrospective of her work. The performance entailed Abramovi´c sitting silently opposite a chair that was offered to participants one at a time. The participants were allowed to sit for as long as they desired. Abramovi´c’s meditative stare, regal dress, and silence rendered her sculptural and explicitly present. Conversely, my ambition in Walkabout is to withdraw. That is, to render myself as equipment, facilitating contact between participants and the ephemeral, immaterial artwork. To withdraw in this sense is not to be invisible as such, but to be in use, in play.

Play What’s Not There This chapter has been an attempt to delineate a network of ideas surrounding Walkabout. In effect, a series of dots have been connected to form a picture. The aim was to trace the emergence of a participatory 129

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 5.34 Handspring Puppet Company and William Kentridge, Woyzeck on the Highveld, The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, 2008. Adrian Kohler (left) and Louis Seboko with puppet Woyzeck.

artwork from a process that paradoxically prized the exact opposite: quiet and private journeys of mind. I began by looking at ways to store ideas so that they would not lie dormant. The motivation was simple: a system that could house ideas and develop organically as a function of them would encourage their production. Thereby released from the anxiety of losing thoughts, I aimed to release to a position within a framework where to have a thought is to perform an act.

Figure 5.35 From Walkabout archive: ‘Thought Acts’, screenshot. 130

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What resulted was a complex, dynamic digital archive of thoughts. Manifesting itself as an associative network rather than a fixed container, the archive’s shape adjusted according to the evolution of the relationships between the digital objects within it. The archive became a tool for engaging and simulating thinking as an activity. In addition to visualizing thought sequences, it gained an almost organic agency as something to speak to and something that spoke back. Later, it became interesting to experiment with the employment of the archive within public, often intimate contexts – employing media to articulate ideas, track conversations, and prompt discussion. These participatory events provided an opportunity to move the project into the public domain without undermining its process-orientated substructure.

Figure 5.36 Cards employed to conclude this chapter.

With the challenge of rendering process in mind, and while taking a break from writing this conclusion, I located a set of playing cards that I had produced as part of an early experiment in staged conversational engagement. The cards feature printed elements from the archive, a selection of triggers to key ideas within the project. Their function within the staged encounters was to allow participants and myself the 131

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opportunity to pick one (or some) as a means to direct or divert the conversation. Now, within the context of this document and more particularly these closing remarks, I decided to select four cards and close this chapter with a simple description of each. In this way, the archive, chance, fragments, combinations, following a rule, process, and play would have the final word: The first card showed an image of an early conversation experiment performed with artist Christian Nerf. We sat opposite one another but were separated by computer screens, speaking through microphones to headphones. Our bodies shared a space, but communication was entirely mediated through digital technology. The second was a note of mine reading: ‘Research as performance’. The third was a cell phone picture of a quote from a magazine, where the futurist Ray Kurzweil writes: ‘Ultimately, we will be able to actually back up the information in our biological systems, including our brains.’21 And the fourth, perfectly opportune, was a quote by Miles Davis (the source of which I’ve lost): ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.’

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

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Walkabout is an ongoing project that was initiated during a Masters in fine art at the University of Cape Town between 2009 and 2011. J.M. Coetzee, ‘Isaac Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientific Language’, in J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Atwell (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 181–94, at p. 187. Julia Robinson, ‘From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht’s Events and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s’, October 127 (2009), pp. 77–108, at p. 105. Albert Camus, The Stranger, transl. Matthew Ward (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 79. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glen Gray (New York: Harper Collins, 1976), p. xiii. Jill Johnston, ‘George Brecht, the philosopher’, Fluxus Heidelberg Center Blog. Available at fluxusheidelbergcenter.blogspot.com/2008/12/georgebrecht-philosopher-of-fluxus.html. (accessed 15 October, 2010) Ilya Kabakov, ‘The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1977)’, in Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive, (Massachusetts: MIT, 2006), pp. 32–7, at p. 37.

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, Harnessing Complexity (New York: Free Press, 2000), pp. 42, 43. Robinson, ‘From Abstraction to Model’. John Cage, ‘Interview (3:35)’, Audio Arts 6 (1983) (cassette). Ibid. Branden W. Joseph, ‘John Cage and the Architecture of Silence’, October 81 (1997), pp. 80–104, at p. 91. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 24. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writing (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1962). Lance Herman, ‘Diary of a Bad Year: An Essay’, unpublished Masters thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010, p. 25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), pp. 31, 32. Coetzee, ‘Isaac Newton’, pp. 184, 191. Ibid. Lutz Dammbeck, ‘Excerpts from an Interview with Jack Burnham’, at A Node for Jack Burnham. Available at www.volny.cz/horvitz/burnham/ lutz-interview.html. (accessed 16 March, 2010) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Blackwell, 2000), p. 98. Ray Kurzweil, Interview, ‘That Singularity Guy’, Vice.com. Available at www.vice.com/read/ray-kurzweil-800-v16n4. (accessed 16 October, 2011)

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6 Participation and Education in Cognitive Capitalism: An Interview with Warren Neidich Claudia Slanar

Warren Neidich’s art is multifaceted: trained in neuropsychology and photography, he works at the intersection of aesthetic theory and various scientific disciplines. In his early photographic works, including American History Reinvented (1988–9), The Unknown Artist (1993), Double Vision (1997–2000), and Shot Reverse Shot (2001), he explored the conditions and qualities of photographic, proto-cinematic, and ophthalmological devices and their relation to perception, memory, and the production of cultural or ‘mnemosyne’ archives. Evoking the performative potential of photography to engage with spectators, these interactions stayed mostly within the confines of this specific medium and its space of representation. In recent years, Neidich’s work has become increasingly engaged with larger questions about the modification and manipulation of discourses, conventions, regulations, and power structures that shape a geopolitics of knowledge, sometimes referred to as ‘noopolitics’.1 Three works of this period – Book Exchange (2010), Education of the Eye (2010), and The Noologists Handbook (2009–11) – are the focus of the 135

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following interview. My discussion of these works with Neidich draws out ways in which the artist investigates ideas concerning relational aesthetics, authorship, performance, and pedagogy. Each of the works discussed contains a ‘participatory’ element. This, combined with the works’ performative gestures of production and participation, suggests a reading within the framework of what Umberto Eco has called an ‘open work’.2 In other words, the works transform the relationship between artist and performers into an openended process that is substantially defined by the participating individual. While the performance/artwork (Eco refers primarily to modern music and literature) is still ‘scored’, there is an active decision on the part of the composer/artist to allow – and even inscribe – openness into the score or script. The ‘poetics’ of the ‘open work’ then ‘encourage[s] “acts of conscious freedom” on the part of the performer and place[s] him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations, among which he chooses to set up his own form’.3 The ‘interrelations’ of Neidich’s ‘relational aesthetics’ are located within the realm of current discussions surrounding ‘cognitive capitalism’, namely the operation of background power structures that shape the mind and seek to create consensus among individuals.4 In his works, Neidich suggests the role that art can play in creating new neuro-architectures that emancipate our minds from such coercive structures. His works (especially The Noologist’s Handbook) can also be read in the light of contemporary discourses around relationships between art, pedagogy, and knowledge production, as they point to the possibility of intellectual emancipation that can be achieved, as Jacques Ranci`ere argues, through the ‘poetic labour of translation’.5 In Neidich’s case, interactivity is therefore related to the physical and the cognitive potential of the inter-agens that may happen between artist(s), performers, and spectators as they constantly shift their roles and places. Let’s start by talking about participation and how it features in your work. Claire Bishop describes three different goals of participatory art: to create agency, to instigate an egalitarian form of authorship, or to restore a social bond that is perceived as being lost.6 Where would you situate your work Book Exchange (2010) within these possibilities?7

My works confront the ideas and issues surrounding participatory practices in a variety of ways. In Book Exchange, citizens of East 136

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Hampton, New York were invited to bring a red book to the Glenn Horowitz Gallery and to exchange it for one of 103 books that Sarah Palin had, allegedly, earmarked for censorship in her hometown library of Wasilla, Alaska. These volumes filled the shelves of a free-standing rotating bookshelf that I designed for the occasion. By the end of the project all the books designated for censorship had been taken, leaving a solid red band of exchanged books within the black frame of the bookcase, visually evoking an early-twentieth-century Russian Constructivist painting. Meanwhile, the books formerly sequestered and registered for censorship were emancipated, fleeing to the far corners of residential East Hampton, where they could be read and enjoyed in perpetuity. I also asked people to sign a time-line drawn on the gallery walls on which the name of the book they brought, the book they took, and their signature were registered. By the end of the show this time-line had encircled the gallery (Fig. 6.1). I think that this work resonates as a middle ground between the opposing camps of contemporary relational art that Claire Bishop sets out in her article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’.8 In that essay, she delineated differences between artistic practices that are centred on the establishment of temporary communities based on either empathy or dissensus. She sees these employed particularly in the works of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, on the one hand, and those of Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, on the other. In Book Exchange, by contrast, a bond or relationship is established between the members of the audience who, through their participation in the work, stand up against the totalizing and normalizing conditions of a modernist trope of censorship, create the work of art, and finally act as distributors of an anarchic form of knowledge. So the work does, in fact, create a form of transcendent empathy and good-will, as in the work of Tiravanija and Gillick. But at the same time it becomes a form of resistance in the Adornian sense that, I think, is present in the projects of Sierra and Hirschhorn.

In this case, however, members of the community do not gather spontaneously, but attend because you invite them to participate. They also contribute to the creation of an ‘object’ in a very specific way. So this seems more like an orchestrated performance to me.

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INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 6.1 Warren Neidich, Book Exchange, 2010. Glenn Horowitz Gallery, East Hampton, New York. Steel, wood and books. Installation view with participants. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

In this piece I was creating more of a situation, not with dogmatic rules, but with what I call ‘boundary conditions’. In the end I wanted there to be two results from the act of participation: the collective act itself and the reference to Constructivist painting. I got the original idea for the object when watching La Chinoise by Jean-Luc Godard, where all 138

In this work, you use books as material for making art. They function as a kind of ready-made, but also as a metaphor for knowledge and the archiving of knowledge. Is this related to a desire to disrupt the idea of an institution that perpetuates the status quo, or to question the power structures that determine the categorization and dissemination of knowledge?

The act of censorship is a kind of sculpting of the archive of knowledge. By allowing individuals to participate in the larger scenario, my artwork shows how the distribution of information can be disturbed and made awkward, forcing different forms of knowledge to become available while downplaying other arrangements. The act of participation in this work also results in the distribution of knowledge throughout the town in a non-hierarchical way, thus subverting the institutional consumer model on which bookstores are typically based. In this bookstore, as in many others, the hierarchical organization of books follows nonoverlapping fields of knowledge. But this is also a strategy for attracting consumer attention that risks trumping what other value the books might have. The censorship condition imposed by Palin is a further expression of power: it is an act of editing the archive that, just like editing the news or a film, changes its content.

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of Mao’s Little Red Books are stacked on a bookcase that becomes a minimalist sculpture.

How does this form of power-relation in this particular participatory moment differ from that in your work Education of the Eye?

The form of participation in Book Exchange is actually similar to the interaction that takes place in Education of the Eye (2010) in which I invited ten artists to my studio and asked them to perform a perceptualmotor task.9 They sat in front of a painting (a reproduction of William Hogarth’s Self Portrait [1757]) for two hours and, using acrylic paint, registered on a wooden palette all the colours that they could perceive in that work. This resulted in the production of ten different ‘paintings’. On the one hand, the participatory nature of the work produced new works of art to be exhibited, thereby commenting on artistic and cultural labour itself: the installation became the presentation of 139

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 6.2 Warren Neidich, Education of the Eye, 2010, Berlin. Performative installation. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

a ‘social techne’. On the other hand, the work was also designed to display subtle differences in seeing and perception. A set of rules was written that instructed the artists to fill in a grid of empty boxes drawn on a wooden palette with the colours they observed in the Hogarth painting. The work was always suffused with the same light, and each trained painter was allowed the same brushes, palette knives, and tubes of acrylic paint (Fig. 6.2). What resulted was quite curious. Certain artists saw colours of which the others were unaware. The resulting wooden palettes on which colours were registered differed greatly, reflecting each artist’s personal preference for colour relationships that were part of his or her habits of perception and taste. Participants appeared to use two very different methods to perform the allotted task. In one group a very analytic method was used: colours were arranged according to hue, and the grid was divided into an ordered colour chart. In the second group, however, a more personal and intuitive regimen was instigated without any apparent strategy. Education of the Eye seems to reflect the transition from pre-industrial to industrial and post-industrial labour. It thus has links to questions of artistic authorship. How is this connected to the term ‘social techne’ that you mentioned earlier?

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The participants were activators of cultural labour on three fronts. First, they were artisans following specific instructions: they produced handmade works through an act of translation by transforming a familiar figural painting into an array of coloured abstract squares. Secondly, especially in the version that was staged in Belgrade, participants were made part of an assembly line in which the rules formed the core of an apparatus that subsumed their creative intelligence into an invisible machine. A special stage was built on which the various tools were made available, and where each sequestered artist worked. As each palette was finished it was displayed on the wall. Thirdly, because the reproduction of Hogarth’s self-portrait was produced in the Chinese city of Dafen – a city in which art copying is an industry in itself – these artists were also participating in the global economy, and making visible an aspect of the wider art market that is often neglected. I think that the term ‘social techne’ is very much linked to my way of creating works of art, but is also important to understanding a shift in aesthetics that has taken place in the past hundred years. John Roberts uses this term in his book The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade.10 He argues that Duchamp’s ready-mades were a breaking point within art history not only because art ceased to be representational, but because the artist no longer functioned as homo faber (a person who creates artworks with his or her hands). For Roberts, this breaking point engendered a new focus on the social conditions in which art is produced. In Education of the Eye, the artists were hired to make the work for me according to the rules that I had established. My aim was to use labour itself as a ready-made. Let’s talk about The Noologist’s Handbook, and the form of participation you chose for this piece. I think it represents a further complication of concepts of spectatorship, participation, and artistic production as you conceived them with changing spatial settings, different positions, and tasks to be performed by the participants.

The original work that led to The Noologist’s Handbook was called The Mind’s I. In that work I asked other artists, film-makers, and writers to visit me in my studio or a museum where I set up a kind of nineteenthcentury stage for a shadow play. The artists had been asked to bring with them three or more objects that were important to them and 141

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that they could fit in the palm of their hand. My collaborators and I cast coloured shadows upon a translucent screen set up between the audience and us. The performance consisted in the collaborative production of an imaginary exhibition in the mind’s eye of my co-worker, with these three objects set in an imaginary space. First, the objects were described, and a narrative was produced in the conversation between me and my collaborator. Secondly, the imaginary space was described, using as its stencil either a real-life exhibition space or one that was fantastic and phantasmagoric. Finally, with our eyes closed, we together created immaterial works of art in the space inside our heads, and installed and lit them accordingly. During this exchange, the audience members were asked to draw their impressions of what they were listening to on blackboard tablets with white chalk. Their drawings were renditions of what they imagined our immaterial exhibition to look like as it occurred in the ‘mind’s eye’ of each person. These tablets were then displayed at the end of the performance. My aim was to display a new form of cognitive work in which subtle changes in material memory architectures are effected. In A Grammar of the Multitude, the Italian political philosopher, Paolo Virno, argues that ‘virtuosic performance’ does not leave any traces.11 My work is intended to show the opposite, that performance does leave memory traces in the minds of artist, collaborator, and audience. Importantly, those traces are both personal and heterogenous. What was created or seen in the ‘mind’s eye’ during the performance was known to each participant alone. In The Noologist’s Handbook, a further procedure was inserted: before the performance, the collaborating artists were asked to pick a piece of paper out of a black hat upon which the words ‘agonistic’, ‘benevolent’, or ‘despotic’ were written. These words then denoted the role I played as ‘curator’ of the event. In the despotic situation, I rejected and negated the artists’ intentions. Thus, the immaterial exhibition in the mind’s eye was a constricted and diluted version of what each artist wanted. In the generous, or benevolent situation, I allowed all of the wishes of the artist to be fulfilled. In the agonistic condition, everything was subject to discussion and agreement (Fig. 6.3). The agonistic situation in this performance is similar to the one described by Claire Bishop in her lecture at Creative Time concerning the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.12 It seeks

to produce a subjectivity that is neither transparent and complete nor decentred and incomplete. The relationship between artist/curator and artist/participant is not either/or, but both. We are a confluence of the two. In The Emancipated Spectator, philosopher Jacques Ranci`ere critiques the binary opposition of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ spectatorship, and calls for spectators to be ‘active translators’.13 For him this is the basic task for an emancipatory practice based on the ‘equality of intelligence’ and not on the hierarchical binaries of, for example, ‘viewing/knowing’ or ‘activity/passivity’.14 I think that these positions are constantly intertwined in your work, and that this performative process of translation comes to the fore in The Noologist’s Handbook and Education of the Eye. Can you comment on the type of ‘active’ spectatorship that your work calls for?

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Figure 6.3 Warren Neidich, The Noologist’s Handbook, 2011, Skopje. Performance. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

In Book Exchange, members of the audience are physically activated as they move throughout the gallery space, bumping into each other in all kinds of encounters and then fulfilling their task of exchanging 143

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a book that they have brought with them and carried around in the gallery. The physical act of exchanging the book triggers political engagement. There is awareness of the fact that governmental forces want to relegate certain books to the wastebasket of lost knowledge, a refusal by participants to accept this process, and, finally, a contribution (through the book exchange) to the random distribution of knowledge to a multiplicity of domestic environments scattered throughout the community. In Education of the Eye I engage an active spectator for the purposes of achieving an alternative distribution of sensibility. I am trying to counter the mechanisms by which our perceptual fields are instrumentalized by systems of rules and regulations that apportion the sensible into discrete elements that form the core of thoughts and concepts. By inviting participating artists to follow another pathway, with another set of rules designed to liberate them, I try to generate alternate fields of sensibility that lead to new perceptual cascades. Colours and methods are uncovered as alternatives. The Noologist’s Handbook worked with imaginary spaces of memory and creativity. The person collaborating with me to make the work represents the first level of participation, as his or her unconscious mind uses its own symbolic logic to express forms of cultural and personal memory. Cultural memory is embedded in neural and mental maps, according to the great mid-century Russian psychologist Lev Vygostky, through learning initiated early in childhood by a process in which external social processes such as language are internalized. My work seeks to reinvigorate these mental ‘maps’, and to have them serve as the very material with which the imaginary exhibitions are built, installed, and ‘lit’ inside our heads. The second level of participation consisted in the audience that watched and listened to the play of shadows projected on the screen. Although the products of my collaborators’ imaginations remained an immaterial artwork, the audience’s active spectatorship resulted in the material production of works of art – namely, their visual ‘translation’ of the oral descriptions into images drawn with chalk on blackboards. You see your work in the very contemporary complex of ‘artistic research’. Does this notion shift the relation between artist and audience

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I think it is essential to understand my works and projects within the spirit of artistic research! Artists use their own practices, histories, performances, apparatuses, methods, theories, conditions, and spaces to investigate scientific spheres of knowledge, but with results that produce interesting alternative paradigms. While in scientific design, variables are limited to one per experiment, in artistic research they are innumerable. I’d rather call them ‘boundary conditions’, as I mentioned earlier. As an artist, I am trying to stimulate change and variability, whereas scientific researchers look for constancy. Education of the Eye and The Noologist’s Handbook are works that very much instantiate my ideas of artistic research. The former uses the tools and methods of aesthetic practice to investigate perception. It asks art-historical questions and references techniques used by other artists. The replica of Hogarth’s painting plays on the role of classic artworks in contemporary projects. The self-portrait imbricates questions of subjectivity and the idea of palette: it suggests what the author looked like, what kind of clothes he wore, but also gives us a sample of his interests and desires through the palette he used to make the original painting. Another theme relates to the relation between figure and abstraction as one is translated into the other; a portrait is reduced to a series of colours that fills up the grid drawn on the palette given to my collaborators. Finally, the nature of rule-based art and artistic production are in dialogue with the works and ideas of Sol Lewitt. Whereas his rules were designed to create a homogeneous work of art, in my piece rules have the opposite effect: they are structured so as to emancipate perception, resulting in the production of a multiplicity of works to be hung in a variety of spaces. At the same time, the work is designed to comment on the nature of perception – on the one hand, as a form of consensus and, on the other, as a multiplicity of alternative worldviews. The Noologist’s Handbook plays upon the idea of the immaterial work of art that formed the basis of conceptual art practice in the 1960s and early 1970s. It pays homage to works by Ian Wilson, Robert

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to an asymmetrical, more traditional one, or does it encourage a new kind of relationship?

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Barry, and Matt Mullican, while at the same time updating conceptual art practices to our moment of ‘cognitive capitalism’. In the sixties, immaterial artworks were made in response to the new collectability of art. Today, by contrast, it broadens its reach to question the idea of immaterial labour as virtuosic, but traceless. In this performance, a new kind of materialism, which the art historian John Roberts has recently called ‘plastic materialism’, is put in place.15 The new products of ‘cognitive capitalism’ are the actual changes that occur in the memory architectures of the brain. Can you elaborate on the concept of ‘cognitive capitalism’?

I use the term ‘cognitive capitalism’ to delineate an idea of power and a means of creating consensus. Consensus is stimulated by the distribution of constancies – things that manifest themselves consistently in, say, the aesthetic or political sphere. These consensual networks are directed to the attention of the spectator for the purpose of producing malleable and attentive consumers of ideas and products. My concern is that this reduces the potential for difference and individuality, and diminishes, for instance, the rich heterogeneity of nature and our ability to engage with it. In an evocative metaphor, Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari have spoken about the ‘song of the earth’.16 They describe our coexistence in nature with a multiplicity of animal forms that have their own ecoaesthetic niches. For example, the size of the beak and tongue of a chaffinch allows that bird to eat only a certain sized seed, of which it forms an image and looks for when hungry. The size of its egg needs a certain nesting site and nest shape, requiring the finch to search for particular grasses and other materials that can help it build a nest that is appropriate for its species. The size of the bird also influences its nest. The colour of its feathers and those of its mate determine its retinal sensitivity, especially during periods of mating, in which specified mating ceremonies weave the body colour into a syntax that leads to the sharing of signs. All together, these different colours and forms are stimuli to which this bird pays attention. If you multiply these ‘niches’ across all living creatures, this is the ‘song of the earth’. Humans, even though they are attuned through their own variable set of organic dispositions to a similar web of colours, shapes, and 146

You’re describing a model of power that has a direct impact on the physiology of the brain itself: the idea that our minds can literally be ‘sculpted’ by institutions and capital flows designed to stimulate and reinforce certain trained responses. In their use of participatory practices, your artworks, by contrast, aim to liberate the mind from these background power structures. Art seems to be a form of cognitive re-education.

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luminosities, build far more efficient distribution systems that they do not need to share. These range from the recognition of constancies in the natural environment to the creation of cultural products. Each culture assigns different values to these constancies that shape attention. If we look at neoliberal global economies today, many of these constancies are manifested by large corporations on a global scale, and are no longer sequestered within particular cultures. We know from theories of neuro-Darwinism and neuro-Constructivism that constancies repeatedly stimulate brain tissue. When networks of constancies are embedded in consumer culture, they create changes in the amount and type of neurological stimulation among humans, and this has ramifications on the way networks in the brain are formed and engaged. What is left is a highly sculpted neurobiological architecture, both static and dynamic, that is tuned to the world into which humans are born. ‘Cognitive capitalism’ risks producing a homogeneous people through, first, the production of politically articulated networks of constancy in the environment, and thereafter patterns of neurological stimulation. Olaf Spoorns, in his book Networks of the Brain, explains how learning and neural plasticity permit the brain to extract statistical regularities from the environment.17 In fact, development can only be fully understood if the networks of the brain are considered in the context of interactions between brain and environment. This has important implications for the role of the artist as cultural producer.

That’s right! We have to understand that the forces of institutionalized regimes and those of aesthetic production compete for neural space. Artists, through the redistribution of the sensible, mutate the pattern of how those constancies live in designed space. By changing the conditions of the cultural landscape, by altering familiar patterns and associations, and by fostering dissonance, art can create new networks 147

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that call for different neurological responses. This is the real meaning of multiplicity and its function in my work: it is the stimulation and celebration of neurological heterogeneity and difference. How have you addressed some of these questions in your works discussed here? How is the work on neuroplasticity important for artists? What does this have to do with art?

Recent research in neuroscience is a major source of inspiration for me. I think that ideas concerning the structure and organization of the brain can be brought into productive contact with questions concerning the function and effect of art on individuals and society. The Noologist’s Handbook was the first step in teaching artists how to ‘shake up’ the physiology of their brains in order to foster epistemological emancipation. In The Mind’s I was an attempt to develop techniques to counter the ‘sculpting’ powers of political institutions, to create points of epistemological resistance. How does your most recent work relate to these ideas? Are you still interested in different modes of participation and activation of the audience?

In my recent work entitled The Infinite Replay of One’s Own SelfDestruction (2012), I recorded a performance undertaken in my studio during which I destroyed one of two stereo speakers with the tools I usually use for making things. The work instantiates the opposite condition of Robert Morris’s work of 1961, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.18 The vintage stereo speakers that I used were like twins. My performance destroys one, and the aural record of its destruction is replayed through the remaining speaker in an infinite loop. The remaining speaker ‘suffers’ the trauma of its partner’s demise endlessly, and the effect is to create an affective psychopathology with the spectator. The noise produced is the sound of that incomprehensible trauma; strident, anarchic, and painful (Fig. 6.4). There are, at least, two aspects to the presentation of the work. First, as a unique object, the remaining speaker is set alone on a small stage and faces a mirror. It becomes a kind of anthropomorphized subject regarding itself in the virtual space of the mirror. The speaker in the 148

reflective surface represents the eternal return of the phantom, and the noise of the performance echoes in the ears of the spectator who views the scenario. Secondly, the remaining speaker can also be placed among other pieces of audio equipment without a mirror, and the broken pieces of its lost partner are strewn upon the floor. Finally, an environment is created in which the former pairing of stereo speakers has been replaced with a sound condition that the spectator is invited to navigate aurally as well as visually.

PARTICIPATION AND EDUCATION IN COGNITIVE CAPITALISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH WARREN NEIDICH

Figure 6.4 Warren Neidich, The Infinite Replay of One’s Own SelfDestruction, 2012. Installation with set of speakers, tools, sound. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Why do you think that this is a participatory installation and not solely an immersive one?

Noise can function as a political gesture by resisting the institutional conditions of music. It can represent all the possibilities of sound that can be, and can stimulate the active production of auditory patterns on the part of the listener. How is this accomplished? Noise destroys recognizable networks of auditory information by introducing relations that are foreign and dissonant. It is, therefore, difficult to absorb and understand. At the same time, however, it is also a space of subjective possibility and creativity. In the sound world created by The Infinite 149

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Replay of One’s Own Self-Destruction, the participant becomes an active subject by producing individual meaning from noise. Although in my installation the audience is active and mobile, this is not a prerequisite. Even the immobile subject sitting in a chair can experience the emancipatory effects of noise. Noise, by its meaningless repetitions and generation of miscellaneous auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination. This contrasts with the role of the passive audience member who is invited to listen to the highly organized and instrumentalized notes and melodies of familiar musical forms. This is what makes it political, as Jacques Attali says in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music.19 Once set free, the participant is able to create his or her own patterns of signification and meaning. John Cage’s famous piece, 4 33 , is a case in point. As the moments of silence are filled with the abstracted and anarchic noises of the audience squirming in their seats, breathing heavily, or dropping pencils, the act of participating in the work actually makes the score. Thus, participation not only creates a new order for art, but allows us to rethink the conditions under which we inhabit and perceive the world.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5

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Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Life and the Living in the Societies of Control’, in Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorensen, eds, Deleuze and the Social (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 186. Umberto Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, in Claire Bishop, ed., Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art (London/Cambridge MA: Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006), p. 20. Ibid., 23. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les Presses du R´eel, 2009). Media theorist Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has described our current form of capitalism as no longer only controlling and exploiting the physiological power of the workforce, but also its cognitive power. See Franco Berardi, The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles/New York: Semiotext(e), 2009). Jacques Ranci`ere, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London/New York: Verso, 2009), p. 10.

7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19

Claire Bishop, ‘Foreword/Viewers as Producers’, in Bishop, Participation, p. 11. Book Exchange was installed in 2010 at the East Hampton Gallery of the bookstore Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (2004), pp. 51–79. Education of the Eye was a two-part project, with the first part taking place at the artist’s studio in Berlin and the second in Dafen, China. It was included in the show Acceptable Differences at the Cultural Center, Belgrade, in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2010. John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007). Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles/New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 47ff. Claire Bishop, ‘Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?’, lecture presented as part of Creative Time’s ‘Living as Form’, New York, 23 September 2011. Available at vimeo.com/24193060 (accessed 31 August, 2012) Ranci`ere, Emancipated Spectator, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 11ff. Roberts, Intangibilities of Form, p. 25. Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), p. 76. Olaf Spoorns, Networks of the Brain (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010). Robert Morris constructed Box with the Sound of Its Own Making in January 1961 in New York City. The noises of carpentry that were produced to build the work were recorded on tape. A small loudspeaker inside the box plays back those sounds, acoustically reenacting the making of the object. The piece is now part of the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 42.

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7 The Audience Cries Back Susan Jarosi

The solitude of the artwork is a false solitude: it is an intertwining or twisting together of sensations, like the cry of a human body. And a human collective is an intertwining and twisting together of sensations in the same way. Jacques Ranci`ere, The Emancipated Spectator1 Questions about authenticity, art, and emotion have become central to contemporary art as it increasingly focuses on the emotional life of the museum and the gallery, and on the moody presence of the spectator. Jennifer Doyle, ‘Critical Tears: Melodrama and Museums’2

Between 7 March and 31 May 2010, the Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovi´c performed The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Though much has been made of the concept of ‘presence’ in recent discourse on performance practice and body art, the title chosen by Abramovi´c was first and foremost indicative of the performance’s simplicity: during the hours when the museum was open to the public – seven hours, five days a week, and ten on Fridays – the artist would sit silently in the museum’s atrium in a straight-backed wooden chair. In total, Abramovi´c sat for 716 hours over 75 days. Visitors were ‘invited to sit silently with the artist, one at a time’ in a square-shaped area, demarcated by white tape 155

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on the floor and illuminated by klieg lights placed in each corner. This circumscribed space served as a boundary between individual participants and the spectators – critic and curator Chrissie Iles likened it to a theatre stage – as visitors to the museum either queued up to wait for a turn to sit opposite Abramovi´c or gathered to watch the performance.3 The initial arrangement of The Artist is Present included a square table positioned between artist and sitter, reminiscent of previous performances by Abramovi´c and her life- and performance-partner of 12 years, Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen), in particular Nightsea Crossing.4 However, two-thirds of the way through the performance, after a wheelchair-bound man caused her to realize that she was unable to see the bodies of the sitters, Abramovi´c discarded the table.5 According to the artist, the removal of this last ‘obstacle’ solidified the significance of the performance, and ‘then the piece started having sense to me’. She continued: I know now that I’m really interested more and more in immaterial art, that removing the table is just this direct connection. And I think that reached the point with the public reaction emotionally the most. I mean, everybody comes there, sits five minutes, and is already in tears, crying. It really removed all the obstacles.6

The title of this chapter – a pun on James Elkins’s book The Object Stares Back – is intended to evoke the particular response on the part of many participants to being stared at so intently by Abramovi´c. Yet it also captures a critical role played by the artist, who constituted an audience unto herself. By being present for the entire duration of the performance and visually engaging each participant who sat in the chair across from her, we might say that Abramovi´c ‘held audience’. She also cried repeatedly (Fig. 7.1). The reversal of the traditional subject position described by Elkins – ‘whatever is seen also sees’ – grants a missing agency to the art object, which ‘stares back’ in confrontation with viewers.7 Abramovi´c was positioned like Elkins’s art object, reciprocating the gazes of her visitors; at the same time, however, the conceit of the performance turned the tables once more so that the object staring back – and then crying – was 156

THE AUDIENCE CRIES BACK Figure 7.1 From the performance of Marina Abramovi´c, The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 March–31 May 2010. Marina Abramovi´c – Day 47 (24 April). Portraits in the Presence of Marina c Abramovi´c by Marco Anelli 2010. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery.

the audience. These ambiguities engendered by The Artist is Present raise a series of compelling questions, central to participatory art, that revolve around fundamental notions of audience and response: Who or what constitutes the work of art? Who exactly forms the audience? Who initiates or reciprocates response? Who cries back? As it happens, another of Elkins’s books also informs the primary interests of this chapter: Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings.8 Although Elkins is singularly concerned with the medium of painting, his study convincingly establishes the provocation of tears by works of art as a time-honoured historical tradition. Time-honoured, if currently out of fashion: Elkins observes 157

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in his conclusion that, beginning in the twentieth century, we have existed in a ‘chosen state’ of ‘nearly perfect tearlessness’ brought on by a constellation of causes including Enlightenment philosophy, Modernism, museums, even art history itself – institutions and disciplines that have favoured the intellectual ‘analysis’ of art over the emotional reaction it can engender, bracketing off the act of seeing from the possibility of feeling.9 In the face of prevailing views that crying has ‘nothing to say about what hangs on the walls of our museums for everyone to see’, nor belongs to ‘the world of public discourse, culture, and history’, Elkins unabashedly sets out to ‘rehabilitate tears’, convinced as he is of their unique capacity to signal that one has been genuinely and powerfully moved by an artwork.10 Jennifer Doyle confirms a similar bias in the contemporary artworld, even in response to so-called ‘extreme performance art’. When she saw Franko B. perform I Miss You! at the Tate Modern in 2003, she was shocked ‘not for the reasons [she had] assumed’ – that the artist’s deliberate yet controlled bleeding via cannula needles inserted into the veins in his forearms might cause her actually to feel something – but rather by the fact that ‘we have been so deeply trained to expect to feel nothing’.11 Doyle has responded by theorizing the ‘effect of intimacy’, which she describes as ‘an aesthetic strategy that marks contemporary art in which the artist offers him or herself up to the audience, and invites us to experience the work as not only autobiographical in terms of the artist, but relational – soliciting a personal, emotional, and narcissistic investment from the spectator’.12 Given the emotionally dehydrated condition of our present era, I like to imagine that Elkins might find encouraging, for their sheer numbers alone, the fact that a significant percentage of participants cried in response to Abramovi´c’s performance of The Artist Is Present. Following the leads of both Elkins and Doyle, this chapter uses the copious tears produced throughout The Artist Is Present to take up the implications of the work’s ‘effect of intimacy’. Specifically, I want to consider the unusual nature of the literal invitation extended by Abramovi´c to the public, the contours of the investment solicited from spectators, the responses of individual sitters that so consistently included tears, and, to use Ranci`ere’s phrase, ‘the intertwining and twisting together of [these] sensations’ that both mobilized and consolidated the performance’s participants and spectators into a collective audience.

The acquisition of photographic and video documentation of The Artist Is Present (including the audience’s consent to the publication of such documentation) was conspicuously announced, and its equipment prominently erected, in the museum’s atrium. The ‘presence’ of such equipment implied yet another audience for the performance – namely, those introduced to the work via mass media or internet sites. The nature and magnitude of the documentation of The Artist Is Present forms a crucial part of its significance as a work of performance art, not least because it draws attention to some of the most fundamental historiographic biases that have surrounded the critical reception of the medium in recent decades – particularly the indifference towards, if not disregard for, the instrumentality of the audience in the staging and documenting of performance art. Philip Auslander has commented on the general absence of the audience from the tradition of performance art documentation: ‘it is very rare that the audience is documented at anything like the same level of detail as the art action. The purpose of most performance art documentation is to make the artist’s work available to a larger audience, not to capture the performance as an “interactional accomplishment”’ to which the artist and audience equally contribute.13 The Artist Is Present would seem to be one of these very rare exceptions. The Italian photographer Marco Anelli, who has worked with Abramovi´c since 2006, arranged with the artist to be present in the atrium with his camera for the entire duration of the performance, so that he could take a portrait of every participant who sat in the chair across from her. Alongside each portrait, Anelli noted the length of time each person sat. Using a high-speed camera with a powerful telephoto lens positioned at a distance behind Abramovi´c and slightly to the left – in essence looking over her left shoulder – Anelli captured a total of 1,545 portraits over the course of the 75 days. Created from a remove, and yet picturing a close-up intimacy, Anelli’s images afford us a privileged ‘outsider’s’ view of the intersubjective exchange between Abramovi´c and the participants. This reciprocal eye contact in fact ‘makes’ the picture (Fig. 7.2). While we look obliquely at the tearful expression of the sitter, we understand it as a product of his looking in the eyes of Abramovi´c, and

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Intimacy and Affect

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INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 7.2 From the performance of Marina Abramovi´c, The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 March–31 May 2010. Visitor #1541 – 5 minutes. Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c by c Marco Anelli 2010. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery.

thus we imagine what the sitter saw as he stared back at the artist. At the same time, Anelli’s photographs allow one to inhabit the artist’s position, to see what Abramovi´c saw as she made eye contact with participants, suggesting that they represent her subjective gaze. This extends to seeing oneself as Abramovi´c in the sitter’s eyes. As portrait #1541 shows so well, Abramovi´c’s very person is contained within the photograph, reflected in the sitter’s dark pupils. The artist is indeed present, even in the portraits documenting participants. In turning to an analysis of the documentation of The Artist Is Present, I should point out one caveat: my examination of the evidence is neither absolute nor, in the scientific sense of measurement, precise. 160

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I tallied the number of incidents of crying based upon the 1,545 portraits taken by Anelli in which I could discern visible tears, as well as upon written descriptions that explicitly identified sitters who cried.14 Omitted were the portraits of some sitters who seemed to be showing signs of crying, with glistening eyes, red noses, or contorted expressions, for example, but who nevertheless were not captured shedding actual tears. According to Abramovi´c, Anelli told her that he focused on the face of each sitter and waited until the ‘precise moment when the tear drop reached the cheek and caught the light’.15 This statement suggests that the portraits of sitters who cried unequivocally reflect that fact, and that their tears were an anticipated – perhaps even desired or intended – response. However, as Iles notes, each portrait was formed by Anelli’s reaction to a combination of chance occurrences over which he had no control: the collective mood of the public . . . the mood of Abramovi´c, and that of each sitter; the physical appearance of each sitter; their emotional reactions to gazing at Abramovi´c; the length of time they stayed in the chair; how crowded the atrium was . . . and the mood of Anelli himself, whose grueling schedule, following that of the artist, tested the limits of his endurance.16

It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that there were participants who may have cried but whose specific portraits did not capture their tears, so that my count represents a qualified minimum. A case in point is the art historian Caroline Jones (portrait #0492), who attributed her tears to feeling pity for Abramovi´c: ‘It was possible for this viewer to be moved by Abramovi´c’s own imprisonment in the artwork and to feel empathy. I cried, she cried, and in that limbic sense our mirror neurons were certainly co-present.’17 Neither Jones’s deliberately dehumanized description nor her tearless photograph, however, betrays her emotional state (Fig. 7.3). Working from these assumptions, I counted 168 incidents of crying, which amounts to 9.2 per cent of sitters.18 It is also worth noting that the artist herself cried at least 12 times. Perhaps the most poignant incident occurred when Ulay sat with her on the third day of the performance, in effect reprising Nightsea Crossing. For this very special participant, Abramovi´c breached the boundaries of the score 161

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 7.3 From the performance of Marina Abramovi´c, The Artist is Present, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 March–31 May 2010. Visitor #0492 – 35 minutes. Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c by c Marco Anelli 2010. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery.

and reached across the table to grasp Ulay’s hands. Although the visual document of Abramovi´c’s crying does not appear among the Flickr photographs of the event, it was reported in the media, and footage of this surprise reunion was subsequently featured in the 2012 documentary film Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist Is Present.19 The prevalence of crying by Abramovi´c and the participants alike captured the attention of a wide audience, facilitated by the web and social media, to such an extent that tears formed a central component of the performance’s marketing. One blog focused on Abramovi´c’s ‘psychic art powers of silent staring’.20 A website with the URL ‘Marina 162

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Abramovic made me cry’ featured Anelli’s portraits of participants who shed tears (though it included only 81).21 The site’s author, Katie Notopoulos, was interviewed by Aaron Rutkoff of The Wall Street Journal for an article entitled ‘The Artist Who Makes People Cry’. Notopoulos explained that a friend had introduced her to the performance by tweeting the link to MoMA’s Flickr page. Rutkoff acknowledged in turn that Notopoulos’s blog ‘has become a widely circulated link itself. Half the people I follow have tweeted it by now.’ Even though she had no prior familiarity with Abramovi´c’s work and had not been a sitter herself, Notopoulos was asked whether she had any insight into ‘these people who choke up. Why all the tears?’ She replied: ‘I think it’s a really charged atmosphere in the room, and then when they’re sitting there, they get in a sort of meditative zone, and I guess it’s some sort of emotional experience.’22 Abramovi´c provided a more detailed explanation of the tearful responses in an interview the day after the performance concluded: What is very new about this performance is that we always perceive the audience as a group, but a group consists of many individuals. In this piece I deal with individuals of that group and it’s just a one-toone relationship. So, when you enter the square of light and you sit on that chair, you’re an individual, and as an individual you are kind of isolated. And you’re in a very interesting situation because you’re observed by the group (the people waiting to sit), you’re observed by me, and you’re observing me – so it’s like triple observation. But then, very soon while you’re having this gaze and looking at me, you start having this invert and you start looking at yourself. So I am just a trigger, I am just a mirror and actually they become aware of their own life, of their own vulnerability, of their own pain, of everything – and that brings the crying. [They are] really crying about their own self, and that is an extremely emotional moment.23

In Abramovi´c’s account of the process by which participants were reduced to tears, she emphasizes her function as a mirror that both deflects her own gaze and reflects that of sitters back onto themselves. Iles offered a similar interpretation, writing that the encounter with Abramovi´c 163

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is filtered through a screen, in this case the artist’s stillness and silence, which renders her distant despite her close proximity. Abramovi´c uses this distancing in the Brechtian sense – as a tool with which to instill in those present a heightened awareness of their own role in forming the artwork’s meaning. But as in the Freudian psychoanalytic model to which her framework is also inescapably related, the apparently blank screen or mirror struggles to remain a neutral surface . . . The accumulated emotional, psychic, and social baggage of hundreds of people over a three-month period, manifested in unpredictable forms up close, inevitably affects the artist, whose stillness deflects it almost imperceptibly back onto the viewer.24

The various models that Iles employs to describe the nature of the exchange between artist and sitter (filtering screen, alienating distance, deflecting mirror) render Abramovi´c’s own tears wholly reflexive and, in effect, minimize the artist’s presence – a somewhat ironic twist given the title of the performance and the comparisons made to religious worship and spiritual transformation.25 The metaphor of the artist as mirror also fails to account for alternative explanations of crying. For example, Abramovi´c’s tears could have conceivably entailed an active empathy for those sitters who began to cry; participants’ tears may have stemmed from the perception of emotions or pain projected by Abramovi´c.26 Nevertheless, the very fact that Abramovi´c cultivated the mirror metaphor highlights her explicit interest in audience and audience response, conveying the sense that she understands her presence not to be self-contained, but rather self-effacing. In this way she allows the audience to play a more prominent part in the work of performance. As a body of photographs documenting the performance of The Artist Is Present, the 1,545 portraits of the sitters are unprecedented and profoundly illuminating. They rupture the historical conventions of both performance-art documentation and response theory by redirecting the camera’s gaze to the audience, and thus reversing response theory’s vector of attention that originates with the work of art.27 Moreover, Anelli’s photographs also enable and invite the audience to consider itself as an audience. We might then ask how these images, as documentary records, capture the artwork? What does it mean to 164

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gain access to and understand a performance primarily from images of its participants? What might we learn from this reverse extrapolation? The specific nature of audience response that forms the nominal subject of this chapter – human tears – makes The Artist Is Present an unusual opportunity for the evaluation of spectator response in the context of performance art. When the audience cried back, and Abramovi´c cried in return, that concurrence was made explicit. The physical act of crying is a very particular kind of response, one that is demonstrable and definable, and perhaps most evocative because its outwardly visible manifestation is so readily captured through photographic documentation. It is important to note that I am not attempting to interpret the myriad emotional responses that may have been expressed by the crying captured in Anelli’s photographs; I do not and cannot ascribe specific meaning to the abundant tears prompted by the performance. Having said that, as a general index of response, tears are tremendously useful.28 They are an unambiguous marker of the emotional content of subjective response, a physical trace of affect. That is, though tears can signal a range of emotions, from frustration to anguish to exaltation, they are almost universally understood to result from intense emotional arousal.29 My aim in focusing on the audience’s tears as a marker of response is to underscore the instrumental role that the audience plays in the making of the work of performance art. In short, I want to suggest that the audience is ‘performance-making’ in two ways: first, the performance of The Artist Is Present could not be understood in the terms laid out in this chapter without such extensive documentation and discussion of the participants. If it had not been documented in the particular manner that it was, I strongly suspect that its critical reception would have been substantially different and much less salient. Secondly, with that point in mind, I want to draw attention to the fact that the engagement with participants evinced in Abramovi´c’s performance is not unique as a work of performance. Although the degree of its engagement may be marked, the instrumentality of the audience is far more common than is conventionally understood in histories of performance practice. The very title of The Artist Is Present is an uncompromising, declarative, yet highly implicative statement. At one and the same time, it asserts presence, community, and posterity. Much as ‘The doctor is

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in’ matters only when a patient is present, Abramovi´c’s performance was thoroughly contingent upon an attendant and attentive audience.30 This fact, however, has been largely unaccounted for in the recent historiography of performance art, a field that has concerned itself almost exclusively with the subject-position of the artist.

Performance Art and/as Body Art Abramovi´c’s use of her own body in The Artist Is Present places the work in the tradition of both performance and body art. The historiography of body art begins in 1970, when Willoughby Sharp coined the term in his essay ‘Body Works’, published in the first issue of the journal Avalanche.31 Sharp discerned a new tendency in art that shared ‘the use of the artist’s own body as sculptural material’.32 In regard to the works’ nomenclature, he noted a distinctive plurality: ‘Variously called actions, performances, events, pieces, things, the works present physical activities, ordinary bodily functions and other usual and unusual manifestations of physicality.’33 This emphasis on the physicality of the artist’s body – as a tool, place, prop, or object – provided the basis for Sharp’s definition of body art: ‘the artist’s body becomes both the subject and the object of the work. The artist is the subject and object of the action.’34 Body art thus describes a sub-genre of performance art developed at the very close of the 1960s, in which the artist him- or herself engages in spare, reductive acts that highlight the physical and phenomenological conditions of the body, usually without recourse to language.35 Unlike happenings, Fluxus events, and more ‘theatrical’ forms of performance art of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Viennese Actionism, body art signalled a shift to performance-based practices that centred on the body of the artist as both subject and object of the work. Abramovi´c’s early performances (she completed her first, Rhythm 10, in 1973) were fundamental to the developing discourse on body art as a distinct genre within the broader category of performance. However, while Abramovi´c almost always utilizes her own body, often as the sole ‘object’ in the work, it does not necessarily constitute its sole subject. In recent decades, scholarship on performance has subscribed to an artificially narrow view of body art that concentrates predominantly or exclusively on the artist’s body as material, to the exclusion of

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the consideration of the audience. Beginning in the mid 1990s, an explosion of scholarly attention devoted to body art served both to eclipse other types of performance art and to represent body art as emblematic of the broader medium.36 Amelia Jones’s Body Art: Performing the Subject (1998) and Tracey Warr’s The Artist’s Body (2000) are now canonical texts, their influence codified by historiographic studies such as Jane Blocker’s What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (2004).37 Blocker’s book, in particular, is illustrative of two significant developments. The first is indicated by the fact that the number of scholarly contributions on body art is large enough for Blocker to ‘engage in the task of reading others’ readings’.38 The second is realized through the pervasive application of the term body art, so that what was initially conceived as a narrower and more specific subcategory has become synonymous with performance art as a whole. Blocker utilizes the two terms interchangeably, for example, as in ‘the case of performance or body art’.39 Theorizations of performance art motivated by a feminist and poststructuralist decentring of the subject (Jones’s work being a case in point) also uphold the artist as the locus of subjectivity. Such studies are explicitly critical of the supposedly privileged knowledge gained by the experience of live performance, and the assumption that it delivers the body of the artist to the viewer in an unmediated fashion. Nonetheless, they assume that the ‘radical shift’ in subjectivity that body art instantiates is that of the artist. When body art, according to Jones, ‘enact[s] the dispersed, multiplied, specific subjectivities of the late capitalist, post-colonial, post-modern era’, it is ‘precisely the relationship of these bodies/subjects to documentation (or, more specifically, to re-presentation) that most profoundly points to the dislocation of the fantasy of the fixed, normative, centered modernist subject’.40 Though I am sympathetic to much of this critique, the audience is nowhere in sight; the subjectivities that body art ‘enacts’, and ‘these bodies’ that point to dislocation, are assumed to be those of the artist. The unique documentation of The Artist Is Present and the emotional engagement of its participants offer the opportunity to readjust the myopic focus on the body of the artist – a corrective that recalls not only fundamental (and now overlooked) components of performance art in the 1960s, but also important aspects of Abramovi´c’s own work. Allan Kaprow’s remarkable essay on ‘Participation Performance’ (1977)

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offers a window onto the kinds of artistic and theoretical problems that emerged within the historical development of participatory art forms, many of which remain germane to current discourse on interactive art in general and to The Artist Is Present in particular.41 A number of these revolve around the formation of community in ‘communal art forms’, particularly the processes involved when the community being established consists of much smaller ‘art-conscious audiences’ who ‘were to take part, were to be, literally, the ingredients of the performances’.42 Kaprow likens the signals and cues ‘sent out by the artist and returned in acknowledgement by the participating audience’ to those that are part of common audience-participation events, such as political rallies, demonstrations, holiday parades, and live radio and TV shows: ‘they are known and accepted; the moves individuals must make are familiar, and their goals or uses are assumed to be clear’.43 However, ‘when the community’s traditions are abandoned for idiosyncratic artistic experiments’, as is often the case with participatory performance, what the audience ‘actually knows or is supposed to derive from the works is uncertain and mute, seeming to have to do with a shared openness to novelty, to be sensitized, to flexibility of stance rather than to possessing a body of hard information and wellrehearsed moves’.44 The uncertainty and muteness of performance art’s cues, the novelty and flexibility of its traditions, require that ‘instruction in participation . . . be more explicit than communal performances and, given the special interests of the audiences, [that it] be at the same moment mysterious’.45 Illustrating this trend, Abramovi´c’s early sound installations, solo performances, and actions that she created in collaboration with Ulay from 1976 to 1988 demonstrate her long-standing investment in establishing a connection to the audience, whether through live performance or through visual documentation. Aaron Moulton has observed that a hallmark of Abramovi´c’s work is its ‘straight dialogue of energy’ with the public.46 It is noteworthy that Abramovi´c participated in 1975 in Hermann Nitsch’s 24 hour performance of The Orgies Mysteries Theater, in the role of ‘actor’ (Nitsch’s preferred term), which suggests her interest in learning first-hand from an example of performance art structured around the dynamic interchange between the artist’s conception, participants’ actions, and audience transformation. One might therefore reconsider the implications of

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the title ‘Relation Works’ that Abramovi´c and Ulay gave to their collaborative performances, and extend its denotation of connection to include the public.47 For example, Imponderabilia (1977) made explicit the relation to the audience: in the entrance to the Galleria Communale D’Arte Moderne in Bologna, Abramovi´c and Ulay stood naked in the doorframe facing each other, planting themselves in the path of visitors wishing to enter. Relation in Time (1977) – wherein the two sat back-to-back, tethered together by their interwoven hair – also incorporated the public’s presence, but as a witnessing body rather than an interactive one. As its score makes clear, Relation in Time was ‘photographic documentation of a performance’ in which, for the first part, lasting 16 hours, the couple sat immobile without the public; for the second part, the final hour, ‘the public comes in’.48 This particular performance, like The Artist Is Present, was conceived of, and executed for, dual audiences – the recording camera and the live public. The Artist Is Present thus contributes to an extensive historical tradition of performance scores that expressly address and engage their audiences. In this context, the instruction for The Artist Is Present is especially significant in light of its level of ‘concordance’ – a term that Hannah Higgins has used to describe the ‘communicational structure’ of the happening, ‘requiring agreement between a clearly identified author and performer (which includes the participatory audience)’.49 I am interested in the relative clarity of distinction between author and performer, as well as the nature and extent of the requisite agreement introduced by the term ‘concordance’ as it might be applied to consideration of The Artist Is Present. The score for The Artist Is Present reads as follows: ‘Visitors are invited to sit silently with the artist, one at a time.’ Its invitation would certainly seem to conform to Kaprow’s directive that instruction in participation must be ‘more explicit than communal performances’. The score tells participants what to do and how to do it. Moreover, in this case the artist and visitor performed the same script, each sitting silently and meeting the eyes of the other. The score is thus neither enjoinder nor imperative, but rather a solicitation of mutual participation – making Higgins’s notion of concordance both apposite and compelling as a means of illuminating the relationship between Abramovi´c and the performing audience. It would be remiss to treat Abramovi´c’s reputation as a performance artist

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working for more than 40 years as inconsequential to the audience’s response. Indeed, her self-presence borders on the auratic. Yet within the economy of Abramovi´c’s programme, the overt availability of her bodily presence established an unexpected and unusual reciprocity between artist, artwork, and audience through a precise correspondence of action. Rather than asserting the supremacy of artist over spectator, The Artist Is Present posited a model of interactive experience that arose from concurrence of action and concordance between artist and participant. In exploring this line of thought, I am reminded of the lessons provided by Jacques Ranci`ere in his book The Emancipated Spectator.50 Ranci`ere seeks to put pressure on ‘any fixity and hierarchy of positions’ that impose distance between and, in effect, privilege artist over audience, active over passive positions, participants over observers, arguing that these tendencies belong to the ‘structure of domination and subjection’.51 He suggests that performance exists autonomously ‘between the idea of the artist and the sensation of comprehension of the spectator’, and that this generates a heterogeneous object owned by no one.52 The artist thus produces neither a lesson nor a message, but a ‘form of consciousness, an intensity of feeling, an energy for action’ that is the spectator’s prerogative to deploy.53 The opposition that Ranci`ere is concerned to bridge is the inequality between performer and spectator, master and pupil. Overcoming this first distance, however, creates a second – between cause and effect – that is conflated with the first. We commonly assume that ‘what will be perceived, felt, understood’ by the audience (effect) is what the artist has put into his or her performance (cause) – an assumption that resuscitates the paradigm of domination and subjection. To the contrary, Ranci`ere argues that a performance is not ‘the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator’ (and here we might add her presence), but an independent ‘third thing’ that ‘subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect’.54 Each spectator or participant, and this includes the artist herself, thus becomes a translator in her own right of the ‘artist’s story’. This chapter has pursued an extended discussion of audience response in The Artist Is Present, in particular as it involved the shedding of tears by a tenth of participants. Highlighting the audience that cried back helps to reveal some of the entrenched issues that have shaped

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and continue to inform the study and reception of performance art. Foremost is the polemical debate about the ontology of performance that unhelpfully pits the champions of performance art’s immediacy and ephemerality against those who privilege its mediated aspects and dependence on documentation. These opposing views are encapsulated by claims such as ‘performance’s only life is in the present’, on the one hand, and that The Artist Is Present ‘ended up exposing the lie of the promise of live art to secure presence’, on the other.55 It would seem in both cases that these arguments seek to define the kind of experience and interaction made available by live art. Both implicitly entail at some level the concept of audience, yet neither is actually concerned with any literal or specific reading of response. Neither accounts for the diverse range of participants’ responses, including tears, that the ‘story’ (to use Ranci`ere’s phrase) of The Artist Is Present engendered. By insisting that the audience is performance-making, I have argued for the ways in which The Artist Is Present is contingent upon – even impossible without – the audience, understood both as individual subject and collective community. In defiance of discourses that ignore the ‘effect of intimacy’ in interactive art, or perhaps in response to them, the participants in The Artist Is Present resorted to one of the most powerful forms of visual communication: they cried back.

Notes 1 2

3

4

Jacques Ranci`ere, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 56. Jennifer Doyle, ‘Critical Tears: Melodrama and Museums’, in Nicholas Baume, ed., Getting Emotional, exhibition catalogue (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2005), pp. 42–53, at p. 45. Chrissie Iles, ‘Marina Abramovi´c and the Public: A Theater of Exchange’, in Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist Is Present, exhibition catalogue (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), p. 40. Nightsea Crossing resonates with many elements of The Artist Is Present. Abramovi´c and Ulay delineated both the ‘time’ of Nightsea Crossing, approximately seven hours per day (the time that most museums are open to the public), and its ‘duration’, a minimum of one day and a maximum of 16 days. During the performance, the couple sat silent and motionless facing each other at either end of a rectangular table (their

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5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

172

own dining table), and abstained from food and water. Nineteen of the 22 performances were conducted in 19 different museums around the world over a three-month period in 1984. See Kristine Stiles, ‘Cloud With Its Shadow’, in Kristine Stiles, Klaus Biesenbach, and Chrissie Iles, Marina Abramovi´c (New York: Phaidon, 2008), pp. 81–4. Daniela Stigh and Zo¨e Jackson, ‘Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist Speaks’, Inside/Out, 3 June 2010. Available at www.moma.org/explore/inside out/ 2010/06/03/marina-abramovic-the-artist-speaks (accessed 1 March, 2011) Ibid. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Harcourt, 1997), p. 86. James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (New York: Routledge, 2001). Ibid., xi; 206–8. Ibid., 39. Jennifer Doyle, ‘Critical Tears: Franko B’s “I Miss You”’. Available at www.franko-b.com/text3.htm. (accessed 15 April, 2014) Ibid. See also Jennifer Doyle, ‘The Effect of Intimacy: Tracey Emin’s Bad-Sex Aesthetics’, in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend, eds, The Art of Tracey Emin (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), pp. 102–18. Philip Auslander, ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, PAJ 84: 3 (September 2006), pp. 1–10, at p. 6. The photographs are published in Marco Anelli, Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c (Bologna: Damiani, 2012), and posted on MoMA’s Flickr site, although the latter is missing portraits from the first two days. Available at www.flickr.com/photos/themuseumofmodernart/sets/ 72157623741486824. (accessed 11 March, 2011) Marina Abramovi´c, ‘The Artist is Present Photographer is Present’, in Anelli, Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c, p. 7. Chrissie Iles, ‘Marco Anelli: Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovi´c’, in ibid., p. 19. Caroline A. Jones, ‘Staged Presence’, Artforum 48: 9 (May 2010), pp. 214– 20, n. 11. Of this total number, 74 per cent were women and 26 per cent men. The gender difference in these figures would seem to reflect the consistent number of crying studies reporting that women demonstrate both a higher propensity and a higher frequency of crying. See, for example, Ad Vingerhoets and Jan Scheirs, ‘Sex Differences in Crying: Empirical Findings and Possible Explanations’, in Agneta H. Fischer, ed., Gender and Emotion: Social Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University

20

21

22

23

24 25

26

27

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19

Press, 2000), 143–65; Jeffrey A. Kottler, The Language of Tears (San Francisco, CA: Josey-Bass, 1996), 148; and Agneta H. Fischer, Marrie H.J. Bekker, Ad Vingerhoets, et al., ‘Femininity, Masculinity, and the Riddle of Crying’, in Ivan Nykl´ıcˇ ek, Lydia Temoshok, and Ad Vingerhoets, eds, Emotional Expression and Health: Advances in Theory, Assessment, and Clinical Applications (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), 289–302. Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist Is Present, directed by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre (HBO Documentary Films and Music Box Films, 2012). Matthew Schnipper, ‘Marina Abramovi´c Made Me Cry (Unless You Are Antony Hegarty)’, TheFader.com, 30 April 2010. Available at www.thefader.com/2010/04/30/marina-abramovic-made-me-cryunless-you-are-antony-hegarty. (accessed 30 April, 2010) Katie Notopolous, ‘Marina Abramovi´c Made Me Cry’, Tumblr.com, last updated June 2010. Available at marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr .com. (accessed 1 March, 2011) All quotes are from Aaron Rutkoff, ‘The Artist Who Makes People Cry’, Wall Street Journal, 29 April 2010. Available at blogs.wsj .com/metropolis/2010/04/29/the-artist-who-makes-people-cry. (accessed 14 February, 2011) Daniela Stigh and Zo¨e Jackson, ‘Marina Abramovi´c: The Artist Speaks’, Inside/Out, 3 June 2010. Available at www.moma.org/ explore/inside out/2010/06/03/marina-abramovic-the-artist-speaks. (accessed 1 March, 2011) Iles, ‘Marina Abramovi´c and the Public’, p. 41. Such comparisons tend to be espoused by critics of Abramovi´c’s performance. See, for example, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Against Performance Art’, Artforum 48: 9 (May 2010), pp. 209–13; and Amelia Jones, “‘The Artist Is Present”: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence’, in TDR: The Drama Review 55: 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 16–45. In the documentary film of The Artist Is Present, Abramovi´c spoke candidly of the physical pain she experienced from sitting for such extended lengths of time, day after day, particularly during the second month of the performance. See, for example, the discussion of reception aesthetics in Wolfgang Kemp, ‘The Work of Art and Its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception’, in Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds, The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 180–96. Specifically, reception aesthetics proceeds from the premise that ‘each work of art is addressed to someone; it works to solicit its ideal

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28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39

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beholder’. It presumes that this ‘implicit beholder’ can be deduced from ‘the signs and means by which the work establishes contact with us’, signs and means that are ‘read’ not directly, but through ‘projections’ with regard to their socio-historical and actual aesthetic statements. Thus, in reception aesthetics the vector of attention, as I have called it, is concerned with the ‘appeals and signals that a work of art directs at its beholder’ (p. 183). Elkins’s study Pictures and Tears similarly takes advantage of tears’ special capacity to demonstrate affect. See also David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). See Kottler, Language of Tears; and Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York: Norton, 1999). Initially, the participating audience for The Artist Is Present was sparse. For the first three days of the performance, the participants’ chair was occupied for only two-and-a-half to three hours in total. But by day four, an audience seems to have coalesced, as Abramovi´c faced sitters for the full seven hours every day thereafter. Willoughby Sharp, ‘Body Works’, Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), pp. 14–7. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid. Ibid. See Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language (Milan: Skira, 1974); Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (New York: Abrams, 1979), pp. 153, 156–9; Kristine Stiles, ‘Performance’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds, Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 75–97, at pp. 84–6; and Stiles, ‘Cloud with Its Shadow’, p. 34. As Stiles notes, ‘The notoriety that performance art achieved in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s had to do with bodily actions that emphasized stamina, perseverance, bodily danger, and tests to the limits of endurance. One thinks especially of the actions of G¨unter Brus, Joseph Beuys, Gina Pane, Marina Abramovi´c, Ulay, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Stelarc.’ See Stiles, ‘Performance’, p. 86. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Tracey Warr, ed., The Artist’s Body (New York: Phaidon, 2000); Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Blocker, What the Body Cost, p. xiii. Ibid., p. 5.

41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

Amelia Jones, ‘ “Presence” in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’, Art Journal 56: 4 (Winter 1997), pp. 11–8, at p. 15. All quotes are from Allan Kaprow, ‘Participation Performance’, in Jeff Kelley, ed., Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 181–94. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 184. Aaron Moulton, ‘Marina Abramovi´c: Re: Performance’, Flash Art 38: 244 (October 2005), p. 87. The relation in ‘Relation Works’ is conventionally taken to refer only to that between Abramovi´c and Ulay, and thus to exclude the audience. In this regard, they have been characterized as possessing a ‘closed-circuit structure’. See, for example, Iles, ‘Marina Abramovi´c and the Public’, p. 43. The score is published in Stiles, Biesenbach, and Iles, Marina Abramovi´c, 74. Higgins notes that the ‘concordance’ of happenings sets them generally apart from Fluxus events, which tend to be more ‘flexible, non-site specific, based in chance, and simply scored’. See Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 112. See Ranci`ere, Emancipated Spectator, pp. 1–23. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., pp. 14–5. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Peggy Phelan, ‘The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction’, in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146; Jones, ‘“The Artist is Present”’, p. 26; See also Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds, Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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8 Ethics in Public: The Return of Antagonistic Performance Harry Weeks

In 2009, The New York Times published a review of a show by the ˙ Polish artist Artur Zmijewski at X Initiative. It largely focused on one particular work, 80064 (2004), in which the artist persuades an Auschwitz survivor to have the identification-number tattoo on his left forearm refreshed. The reviewer asks the question: ‘Was this hackneyed lesson worth the price of an old man’s peace of mind?’ He ˙ then goes on to describe Zmijewski’s practice as ‘morally troubling’ 1 and ‘sociologically provocative’. The Dutch artist Renzo Martens has received similar attention, inciting strong reactions to screenings of his work Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2009). During the filming of this video piece he was ordered by the United Nations to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the geographical subject of Episode III, in light of his allegedly unethical treatment of local participants in the work.2 As art has undergone its well-documented and much-debated shift away from representation towards materially embedded practices – or, as Nikos Papastergiadis puts it, ‘from image production to the initiation of scenes for the replaying of social relations’ – criticisms ˙ such as those directed at Martens and Zmijewski have become in3 creasingly commonplace. Artists’ desires to do something, as Dan Graham allegedly demanded, ‘more social . . . and more real than art’, 177

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have led to the adoption of increasingly ‘collaborative or collective modes of production’ as a means of importing sociality into the artistic process.4 Claire Bishop suggested in 2006 that, in light of this paradigm shift, the artwork is no longer the site of critique; rather, it is the ‘working process – the degree to which artworks supply good or bad models of collaboration’.5 Anthony Downey later elaborated upon this observation, suggesting that it is the ‘ethical efficacy’ of collaboration between artists and participants that provides the basis for much of the criticism of materially embedded practices.6 But it is not possible, as Bishop does, to characterize the ‘ethical turn’ in criticism as simply an inadvertent side effect of the structural introduction of collaborative forms of engagement into art.7 Grant Kester, whom Bishop has implicated in this supposed subjugation of the aesthetic to the ethical, has suggested that many exponents of the ‘collaborative turn’ deliberately take ethics as their subjectmatter, purposefully implementing the ‘strategic production of shame or guilt in the viewer (in order to awaken a presumably dormant ethical sensibility)’.8 The curator Kirsten Lloyd has commented of ˙ Martens and Zmijewski that they ‘apparently relish the shock induced when they substitute the ultra-ethical artist-as-social worker with the deliberately provocative artist-as-sociopath model’.9 It therefore seems irrefutable that the increasing currency of ethics in discussions of contemporary art is not merely the result of theoretical exegesis, but rather the effect of a concerted effort on the part of many contemporary ˙ practitioners (of whom Martens and Zmijewski are arguably the most visible) to probe via artistic means what the French philosopher Alain Badiou has described as the ‘ethical delirium’ of contemporary society.10 In this chapter, I investigate one means by which this ethical probing is achieved – namely, the reintroduction of performance as a materially embedded component in the artistic process. ˙ It is on the subject of performance that Martens and Zmijewski, so often mentioned in tandem as examples of an ethically transgressive ˙ tendency in contemporary art, diverge. In the case of Zmijewski’s practice, Downey suggests that it is the artist’s coercion of participants to ‘debase themselves in the name of artistic production’ that provides the predominant basis for his ethical transgressions.11 But these participants are largely aware of the exercise in which they partake. They may not particularly enjoy it; they may, as Downey suggests, even

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be thoroughly degraded by the experience; yet their involvement is consensual, taking the form of an agreed financial transaction. Martens, by contrast, commits an ethical transgression based upon the strategic utilization of various antagonisms intrinsic to performance. Episode III is a 90 minute film documenting Martens’s actions over a two-year period spent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artist acts as central protagonist, shifting between the roles of journalist, post-colonial tourist, aid worker, pedagogue, and film-maker, in the course of making a deliberately confusing, complex, and contradictory argument regarding humanitarian aid and photojournalism. His artistic intentions are not made consistently explicit during Episode III. Instead, he intermingles moments of brutal honesty (informing participants that the film is not intended for them and will only be shown in Europe) with periods during which he is secretive and even misleading as to his role and purpose (tricking a group of local photographers into believing that they might have successful careers as international press photographers, all the while fully aware that this plan is flawed and doomed to failure). The upshot is that participants readily interacted with Martens while remaining subject to continually unstable assumptions. Martens has been far from alone in adopting such a performancebased process as a means of exploring society’s ‘ethical delirium’. Artists such as the Estonian Kristina Norman and the Israeli/Czech Shlomi Yaffe, as well as tactical media exponents the Yes Men, have utilized such strategies to similar ends. Focusing on these examples, it is my intention, firstly, to examine the specificities of performance in order to discern the root of its ethical potentiality and to explain its return as a widely employed artistic strategy. Secondly, I shall examine the reception of such work, and will contrast reactions to the ‘art’ practices of Martens, Norman, and Yaffe with the more ‘activist’ work of the Yes Men. This will highlight a discrepancy in the ethical judgement of performance when deployed in these two different contexts.

Performance is Dangerous ‘Performance is dangerous’, as the performance theorist Richard Schechner has noted. It is ‘subjunctive’, ‘liminal’, and ‘duplicitous’.12 It is ‘dangerous’ because it instils a degree of distance, or establishes 179

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a shield behind which the performer may hide. In playing a role, the performer has license to become more exaggerated in deed and gesture, a caricatured figure whose ‘actions can be carried to extremes’.13 Thus performance must be ‘hedged in with conventions and frames’ as a means of making it safe.14 The conventions associated with television, theatre, radio and cinema offset the threat posed by performance so that, as Schechner suggests, its inherent danger is converted into ‘fun’. When art began both to vacate traditional spaces of exhibition and to turn its back on, or at least complicate, the media of painting and sculpture during the 1960s and 1970s, many artists turned their attention to performance. They did so out of a fundamental realization that, if performance escaped its ‘conventions and frames’, it could be a powerful, disturbing and, most of all, dangerous tool. Vito Acconci exploited an unsuspecting public, transforming them into oblivious players in his sexualized, transgressive games, while Marina Abramovi´c coaxed the gallery-going classes into incongruous acts of savagery and brutality.15 Throughout this first wave of performance art, however, the intention was never simply danger for danger’s sake. Rather, the goal was to achieve Dan Graham’s ‘dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art’. Paradoxically, the constructed and illusory nature of performance was seen to afford the possibility to actualize precisely that dream. As performance became a familiar medium, however, it became subject to another set of ‘conventions and frames’. The danger dissipated and, with it, the prospect of doing something ‘more real than art’. The artist Yvonne Rainer recently commented on the reduced impact of Abramovi´c’s reperformances at her 2010 MoMA retrospective, ‘The Artist is Present’, in which the artist procured the services of performers to play roles that she had originally fulfilled herself. Rainer expressed her displeasure at Abramovi´c’s ‘obliviousness to differences in context [and to] the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others’.16 During the 1990s, particularly among the practices of the artists discussed by Nicolas Bourriaud in his analysis of contemporary participatory art, Relational Aesthetics, performance regained substantial visibility in the major outlets of the international artworld. However, the particular brands of performance that proliferated in this period were

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typically of a framed and conventionalized form. On the one hand, there are performances that are designed to be pleasant, consensual, and inclusive. The cookery performances of Rirkrit Tiravanija, for instance, are bound by an awareness of the rules of the game being played. On the other hand, a tendency has also emerged towards what Bishop refers to as ‘delegated performance’. She notes that, ‘in the early ’90s, particularly in Europe . . . artists started to pay or persuade other people to undertake their performances’.17 Regardless of the ethical implications of hiring participants to perform as part of an artwork, the very process of hiring implies a system of practices within which performance is made subject to familiar customs and controls.18 The participants are aware that they are contributing to a performance, and generally know what kind of performance is being enacted. Shannon Jackson, in her book Social Works, and Grant Kester, in The One and the Many, have both commented on just how prevalent the performative is in contemporary artistic practice. In addition to the examples discussed above, they cite a plethora of others including works by Superflex, Paul Chan, and Elmgreen and Dragset.19 Elsewhere, theorists such as Jan Verwoert and Sven L¨utticken have commented on ways in which neoliberalism necessitates an everyday labour of ‘general performance’.20 Verwoert claims that ‘one thing seems certain: after the disappearance of manual labour from the lives of most people in the Western world, we have entered into a culture where we no longer just work, we perform’.21 In a wide variety of contemporary contexts, both artistic and societal, Jackson’s recognition of a ‘performative turn’ seems most apt.22 The strand of performance under discussion in this chapter, however, is specifically that which returns to performance art of the 1960s and 1970s in order to locate its idioms and tactics. While they produce what is usually termed ‘socially engaged’ or ‘participatory’ art, it is essential to acknowledge the debt that artists such as Martens owe to earlier forms of performance art. Martens himself has identified his practice with performance, stating that ‘the film is a performance of the discourses of the white man (Renzo Martens) taking responsibility for everything we in the West are and do’.23 Fundamental to defining this practice as performance is the centrality of role-playing to the artistic process. In contrast, for example, to the work of a similarly ‘socially engaged’ or ‘participatory’ artist such as

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Thomas Hirschhorn, Martens and the other artists to whom I shall turn shortly privilege a destabilization of the artist’s position within the artwork. While Hirschhorn’s subjectivity as artist is cast as permanent and immovable throughout his many pavilion and monument works, those whom I am characterizing as exemplary of the former variety of performance strategically and consistently adopt diverse roles in the service of their artistic practice. Martens, for instance, commented in an interview on Episode III on the existence of ‘two Renzos’ within the work.24 A number of other tropes and idioms of earlier styles of performance art are also reintroduced in their practice. Performance has once again escaped the confines of the gallery, the artists themselves are reinstated as central protagonists, and the public implicated in the performance is unaware either of its participation or of the nature of the performance being enacted. Importantly, in addition to these features, the nature of the performance remains unexplained to those who view the documented performance in a gallery context. This uncertainty on the part of the audience stems from the fusion of performance – replete with its deceptions, dangers, and exaggerations – with the documentary form, which, despite having been discredited and questioned in terms of its veracity for as long as the form has existed, nevertheless maintains an air of authority and objectivity. This synthesis leaves the viewer in a state of unresolvable ambiguity and confusion as to what it is exactly that he or she is receiving: factual reportage or fictional act. This is particularly true with Renzo Martens, who, in Episode III, frequently and abruptly shifts his character traits from heartfelt sympathy and parodic post-colonial arrogance to reckless playfulness and indifference to those around him. As Ruben de Roo has commented, ‘the ambiguous feeling that the film leaves us with may be attributed in no small measure to its documentary format’.25

The Antagonisms of Performance: Shlomi Yaffe and Kristina Norman Numerous recent discussions of the turn towards materially embedded practices in contemporary art have focused on the issue of ‘antagonism’.26 In the case of performance-based practices, this concept 182

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is particularly pertinent. In art-historical contexts, understanding of the term has derived largely from political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.27 Bishop summarizes their formulation of the term, stating that antagonism is ‘the relationship that emerges between . . . incomplete entities’, going on to explain that ‘the presence of what is not me renders my identity precarious and vulnerable, and the threat that the other represents transforms my own sense of self into something questionable’.28 Antagonism is the discomfort generated from the proximity of two bodies, each of which prevents the other from functioning in its entirety, or being fully ‘itself’.29 The danger of performance, as discussed by Schechner, derives precisely from this notion of antagonism, or, to be more specific, two antagonisms inherent to performance in all its guises. The first of these is internal to the performer – an antagonism between the performer and the performed role. The second, and more significant, is external, between the performer and the public implicated by the performance. The examples of Yaffe and Norman are here apt to demonstrate how these antagonisms manifest themselves in contemporary practice. Shlomi Yaffe’s 2006 video document of a public performance, How I Changed My Ideology in Prague Market, shows the artist walking around Prague market. At the outset of the video, he is dressed simply as himself, clad in black, with moderately long hair and a backpack. At each stall he buys a new item of clothing or accessory, starting with some military-style combat trousers, followed by a camouflage t-shirt, a green and orange bomber jacket, and a pair of work boots. Upon purchase, he immediately puts on each item of clothing. Having replaced his own clothes with these new items, he buys a razor and attempts to shave his own head. This proves unsuccessful, so he visits a barber who crops Yaffe’s hair. Finally, he buys a pair of knuckledusters, and the film ends with the artist walking past the camera, placing the knuckle-dusters on his hand and clenching his fist (Fig. 8.1). While the entire piece takes the form of a public performance, what we witness is a gradual visual transformation from performer (Yaffe) to performed (Yaffe-as-neo-Nazi).30 The first of the antagonisms inherent to performance exists between these two figures – the performer and performed. By adopting a role, the performer is prevented from being fully him- or herself by

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Figure 8.1 Still from Shlomi Yaffe, How I Changed My Ideology in Prague Market (2006), eight minutes, digital video. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

the presence of the character played and the site occupied. As the performance artist Anthony Howell has remarked, ‘in performance art, one is artist and artwork at the same time. Thus the issue of the “subject” and its identity is permeated with ambiguity’.31 At the start of Yaffe’s work, he is relatively ‘himself’. However, with each new item of clothing, he is overtaken by his neo-Nazi persona, his own identity compromised by this second, performed identity. People’s reactions to him alter as this new character develops, and his own actions become more in keeping with the supposed traits of the stereotyped role he adopts. When he walks towards the camera and clenches his knuckle-duster-bearing fist at the conclusion of the work, this is the action of the performed, as opposed to the performer. Conversely, due to the fact that the performed role is temporary, this character can never ‘fully be himself’ either. Instead he remains subject to the will of the performer, who can remove the costume and return to normality at any moment. Thus there exists a mutual antagonism between performer and performed. This antagonism is consensual, however. The artist, by virtue of being the instigator, 184

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choreographer, and protagonist of the performance is both aware and willing throughout. The danger of performance does not, therefore, derive directly from this performer/performed antagonism, but emerges via a second antagonism, which is predicated upon this first internal antagonism. This second (external) antagonism is more urgent. The ambiguity generated by the confusion of the performer’s two identities prevents bystanders from being fully themselves. Members of the public, unaware that they are taking part in a performance, or unsure as to the nature of the performance, are uncertain whether they are interacting with the performer or the performed, and their interactions are tempered by this uncertainty. Furthermore, the artist’s performance casts the implicated public as unconscious performers, who then develop their own internal performer/performed dichotomy. Yaffe, for example, implicates the market sellers as actors within the narrative he constructs. Each becomes complicit in the artist’s performative journey towards neo-Nazism, inadvertently compromising their own identities by becoming players in Yaffe’s game. They quite literally become his wardrobe department, providing him with a costume, as well as being extras in the finished production. Kristina Norman exploits this second antagonism between performer and public as a core conceit of her 2009 work After-War. In 2007, Norman made a 15-minute documentary video work entitled Monolith. This presented a mixture of found footage and video, recorded by the artist, of the escalating tensions (which ultimately culminated in rioting) between the Estonian and Russian populations of Tallinn that ensued after the removal of a Soviet war memorial (commonly referred to as the ‘Bronze Soldier’) from central Tallinn.32 This became the basis for After-War, an installation exhibited at the Estonian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. The work consisted of, among other objects, a two-metre-tall, gold-painted replica of the monument hanging from the ceiling, almost parallel to the ground; a rotating advertising hoarding displaying the site of the monument before and after its removal; and a video that documented a performance the artist had undertaken on 9 May 2009, the former Soviet ‘Victory Day’ that commemorated the victory of Soviet forces over Nazi Germany in 1945. This video and performance are the elements of After-War requiring particular attention for the purposes of this analysis.

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Figure 8.2 Kristina Norman, After-War (2009), still from documentation of performance on 9 May 2009, 12 minutes, digital video. Image provided courtesy of the artist.

The video shows the artist arriving at T˜onism¨agi, the site of the Bronze Soldier prior to its relocation, amid a crowd comprising members of the local Russian community to whom 9 May still represents a day of huge historical import. Norman brings with her the vast gold replica of the Bronze Soldier and proceeds to erect it in the location of the original monument. Those gathered express a nearuniversal gratitude and admiration for the soldier and artist. Some take photographs, others lay flowers around its feet. Within half an hour, however, the police arrive, topple the statue, place it on the back of a police van, and remove it and the artist from the scene, amid the protesting shouts of those gathered in T˜onism¨agi and the artist herself (Fig. 8.2). The performance garnered a great deal of media attention, much of it highly critical of the artist. Estonian interior minister Juhri Pihl observed: ‘I don’t know whether it is art. It is a provocation, though.’ Commenters on Estonian online news services left posts such as: ‘It is anti-state activity and the “artist” Norman should be sent to prison for a long time’.33 While critics of Norman’s work have accused the artist of ethical irresponsibility, I would argue that there is a more intricate form of transgression at work here.34 Norman wins the gathered crowd’s trust – a 186

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For the Russian community, taking a small replica of the monument to its previous location was kind of an attempt to return ‘confiscated instruments’ to their comrades, so that they could, in a dignified manner, celebrate the victory of the Great Patriotic War. I am demonstrating that the community needs such instruments in order to practise their communal and national identity rituals of intensification.35

In other words, while for the local Russian community Norman’s installation of this gold soldier may be seen as a patriotic act, for the artist it is a theoretical exercise, a conceit that demonstrates the conceptual importance of symbolic objects to collective identity formation. In a subsequent interview, the artist even went so far as to acknowledge: ‘I took advantage of this situation.’36 Here, the Russian crowd is utilized as a tool in the artist’s larger game. The artist’s presence as a ‘performed identity’ renders the audience’s own identity precarious: the roles that audience members believe they are playing are not the roles they are perceived to be playing. These two antagonisms give rise to a central debate regarding the ‘ethical efficacy’ of the artistic process – that on exploitation. The artists discussed above prevent participants in the work from being fully themselves, thus infringing ‘fundamental liberties’ and ‘rights’, which, as Badiou states, provide many pretexts for contemporary ethics. Furthermore, they use this infringement to suit their own ends.37 Gregory Sholette, in his book Dark Matter, discusses the artworld’s reliance on the unpaid, unrewarded, and unacknowledged labour of ‘hidden producers’ or ‘invisibles’.38 In both After-War and How I Changed My Ideology in Prague Market, the artist relies on the non-contractual and unwitting participation of individuals encountered over the course of the performance. The works would not exist without the essential roles played by strangers in the two performances, and yet in both cases the latter are unaware of their centrality to proceedings. Indeed, their

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result of her installation of this statue being seen as a pro-Russian statement, corroborated by the fact that she speaks Russian. They presume, fairly enough, that she is ‘one of them’, and that she shares the same beliefs and goals. Writing about this performance, however, Norman says the following:

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ignorance of their role is required in order for these performances to attain the degree of danger so important to their constitution.

The Yes Men: Ethical Pioneers? In recent years, many artists have been identified (pejoratively) as sociopaths, businessmen, and capitalist exploiters.39 Given the antagonisms I have highlighted in the practices of Norman, Yaffe, and Martens, this is perhaps unsurprising. But criticisms such as these downplay the fact that, for the most part, such materially embedded practices have been predicated on what Erik Hagoort has described as ‘good intentions’.40 Norman, Yaffe, and Martens may, to some degree, exploit unwitting participants in their works; they may all deliberately instigate and intensify antagonisms. But they do so in the service of practices that positively and actively engage with sociality and the nature of social relations. Here I differentiate their practices from those of Santiago Sierra, for instance, whose exercises in exploitation seek primarily to expose the inadequacies of the society within which his work is framed.41 In contrast, Renzo Martens’s stark presentation of facts and arguments universally elided in discourses surrounding aid and poverty does much more than simply expose – it prompts a dialogue. This use of performance in the service of a wider political or social project means that these works share more with the realm of tactical media than they do with the works of Sierra. They are interventions, as opposed to simply expositions. The theorist Rita Raley interprets tactical media as a form of performance. She says that ‘to conceive of tactical media in terms of performance is to point to a fluidity of its actants, to emphasize its ephemerality’.42 The Yes Men commonly adopt false identities, usually mimicking spokespersons for multinational corporations, as a means of disrupting the political sphere. In 2004, Andy Bichlbaum, one of the Yes Men, appeared on BBC World News in the guise of an invented executive of the Dow Chemical Company, Jude Finisterra. His appearance coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, a gas leak caused by the negligence of Union Carbide India Ltd, a chemical company taken over by Dow in 2001. Tens of thousands were killed in the incident, and many more suffered gas-related diseases.

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In his appearance on BBC News, Bichlbaum announced that Dow were to inject US$12 billion into the regeneration of Bhopal, accepting full responsibility for the disaster. Dow shares swiftly dropped in value, as tricked investors sought to extricate themselves from this loss-making scheme. It is the performative elements of the Yes Men’s work (the adoption of fictitious characters, the circulation of false narratives) that allow them to operate with such ephemerality. This does not negatively impact on their work’s political agency; rather, it is central to it. The Yes Men thrive on the immediacy of contemporary mass media, exemplified by 24 hour rolling news and instantaneous online coverage. The Bhopal hoax required only 23 minutes to wipe out a substantial portion of Dow’s monetary worth by triggering a sudden and massive crisis of confidence in the financial prospects of the company. While performance provides the Yes Men’s work with its political agency, it generates the same antagonisms as seen in the work of Martens, Norman, and Yaffe, and, likewise, could be questioned on the grounds of exploitation. Indeed, in their film The Yes Men Fix The World (2009), the group devote a portion of the introduction of the film to media criticisms of their supposedly unethical behaviour (Fig. 8.3).

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Figure 8.3 Still showing Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno visiting Bhopal, from The Yes Men, The Yes Men Fix The World (2009).

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In this instance, the people of Bhopal, albeit briefly, were under the impression that they were to receive substantial compensation. But the purpose of the Yes Men’s action was not to prompt the financial compensation of the residents of Bhopal, but rather to stimulate a situation in which ‘signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible’.43 The citizens of Bhopal become the invisible ‘dark matter’ in a political struggle between the Yes Men and the multinationals that the group sets as its targets. After their intervention, the Yes Men visited Bhopal in order to investigate the possibility that they had, in fact, exploited this population, that they had transgressed an ethical boundary for the purpose of achieving some ‘greater good’. While the people interviewed universally applauded the actions of the Yes Men, we cannot take their reactions at face value. After all, it is the Yes Men who chose the interviewees, decided which discussions to include in their documentation, and ultimately retained editorial power over the interviews. What is more telling is the fact that they felt the need to visit Bhopal and to measure the reaction at all. In order to further complicate matters, the ‘good intentions’ of the Yes Men are usually based on interrogating what they deem to be the unethical behaviour of the multinationals they target.44 They are often described as a ‘corporate ethics activist group’ – the Guardian newspaper even citing them in an article on ‘ethical pioneers changing the way we live’.45 As this Guardian article demonstrates, the Yes Men have on the whole received a far more positive press than, for instance, Martens, despite the similarities between them (fundamentally, their use of performance to transgress certain ethical boundaries). The reasoning behind the simultaneous condemnation of the artist and praise of the activist according to the same set of ethical criteria must therefore lie ˙ elsewhere. If we return to the criticism directed at Zmijewski, quoted at the outset of this chapter, one of the central elements of ethical judgement is revealed. ‘Was this hackneyed lesson worth the price of an old man’s peace of mind?’ asked Ken Johnson. The ethical question posed here is not whether the action of tattooing was, in isolation, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, nor whether the lesson being taught is the result of ‘good intentions’ or ‘bad’, but whether the intended outcome of the action was worth its negative consequences. What is demanded here is a judgment as to whether an end justifies the means.

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For an end to justify the means, however, requires the actual existence ˙ of an end. Zmijewski never makes the intended outcome of tattooing his subject explicit. Likewise, neither Martens, nor Norman, nor Yaffe consistently and categorically broadcast their goals and objectives. Martens says of Episode III that it ‘deals with pain, but then doesn’t offer the audience a way out. Watching it does not, in one way or another, resolve it. And that’s quite a shock to many people’.46 The deliberate clouding of artistic intentionality and the resistance of performance to concrete resolution have indeed been symptoms of the recent turn towards materially embedded practices – a strategy that differentiates current tendencies in contemporary art from, for instance, the activist work of feminist artists and collectives such as the Guerrilla Girls. Con˙ trary to Zmijewski’s call in his curatorial thesis for the 2012 Berlin Biennale for ‘an art that acts and works, with effective procedures of change ˙ and an ongoing influence on reality’, artists, including Zmijewski himself, have, on the whole, evaded such instrumentalization in the service of a political cause.47 While artists may espouse certain political affiliations, and while artworks may reference or negotiate a particular social or political cause, it is a rarity now to find unambiguous political ideology or action within the confines of the artworld – and when art is framed in that way, it is often met with suspicion. For the most part, an interpretive openness has shown itself to be considerably more desirable to artists in recent years than quantifiable outcomes. Similarly, while the exhibition of an artwork may seem to represent a form of end, it is the nature of art that this merely represents another moment in its interpretive evolution. At this point it is offered to the audience, critics, art historians, and theorists who are free to debate further and suggest various analyses of its content. This is, perhaps, the defining criterion by which contemporary art can be differentiated from contemporary activism, even though, as I have demonstrated, many other characteristics are shared by the two fields. While art delights in the relative autonomy it is afforded, and in the intellectual rumination and interpretive openness this allows, activism seeks a fixed and unambiguous end. Were tactical media exponents to eschew such a distinct conclusion, the negative consequences of their actions would lack any basis for resolution,

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Conclusions: The ‘Ethical Efficacy’ of Art and Tactical Media

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excuse, or justification. While judgements grounded upon ‘ethical efficacy’ would be detrimental to the causes of activist work, it has been profoundly embraced by artists to the point where ethical transgression without justification is actively sought as a constituent part of the artistic process. The unleashing of this style of performance into the public sphere once more has afforded the possibility of precisely such a methodical and, paradoxically, productive transgression of ethics.

Notes 1

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5 6 7 8

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Ken Johnson, ‘An Artist Turns People Into His Marionettes’, New York Times, 29 November 2009. Available at www.nytimes.com/2009/ 11/30/arts/design/30zmijewski.html. (accessed 28 May, 2012) Anthony Downey, ‘An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer’, Third Text 23: 5 (2009), pp. 593–603, at p. 601. Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue’, in Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 275–88, at p. 277. The provenance of this oft-cited, and perhaps apocryphal, quotation from Dan Graham is not given in any of the numerous texts it is quoted in. It is used as the epigraph of Claire Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, Artforum 44: 6 (2006), pp. 179–85, at p. 179. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 1. Bishop, ‘Social Turn’, p. 180. Downey, ‘Ethics of Engagement’, p. 595. Bishop borrows this term from Jacques Ranci`ere. Bishop, ‘Social Turn’, p. 180. Grant H. Kester, ‘The Sound of Breaking Glass, Part II: Agonism and the Taming of Dissent’, e-flux 31 ( January 2012). Renzo Martens echoes Kester’s statement: ‘I think the film breaks one clear rule: that audiences should be exempt from the pain’. T.J. Demos, ‘Toward a New Institutional Critique: A Conversation with Renzo Martens’, Atl´antica 52 (2012), pp. 90–103, at p. 91. Kirsten Lloyd, ‘The Caress: Intimate Transactions in the Video Work of Dani Marti’, in Matt Price, ed., Dani Marti (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), pp. 66–75, at p. 71. ‘Ethical delirium’, Badiou contends, is the repressed and consensualized societal state deriving from the hegemonic ‘ideological current’ of

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‘moralism’ and ‘generalized victimization’ that characterized the period during which the book was written – the early 1990s. He states that ‘the presumed “rights of man” were serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought’. It is arguable that such a designation still pertains almost two decades later. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso Books, 2002), p. liii. Downey, ‘Ethics of Engagement’, p. 597. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2003), p. xix. Ibid. Ibid. For instance, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) and Marina Abramovi´c’s Rhythm 0 (1974). Ellen Feiss, ‘Endurance Performance: Post-2008’, Afterall, 23 May 2012. Available at www.afterall.org/online/endurance-performancepost-2008/ (accessed 28 May, 2012) Claire Bishop, ‘Outsourcing Authenticity? Delegated Performance in Contemporary Art’, in Claire Bishop and Silvia Tramontana, eds, Double Agent (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2009), p. 111. Criticisms of the likes of Santiago Sierra, and those regarding Artur ˙ Zmijewski to which I alluded earlier, focus explicitly on this point. See also the excellent article by Ellen Feiss on Abramovi´c’s re-performances. Feiss, ‘Endurance Performance’. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). Kester, The One and the Many. Sven L¨utticken, ‘General Performance’, e-flux 31 ( January 2012). Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform’, Dot Dot Dot 15 (2008), pp. 89–112, at p. 90. Jackson, Social Works, p. 2. Frances Guerin, ‘Interview with Renzo Martens’, ArtSlant, January 2009. Available at www.artslant.com/ny/artists/rackroom/39542 (accessed 23 May, 2012) Ibid. Ruben De Roo, ‘Immorality as Ethics: Renzo Martens’s Enjoy Poverty’, in Lieven De Cauter, Ruben De Roo, and Karel Vanhaesebrouck eds, Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi, 2011), p. 144. This is most notably the case in Claire Bishop’s ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (2004), pp. 51–79. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, p. 66.

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Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 122. Martens comments on the existence of a similar dichotomy in his own work. ‘Within this performance there are two Renzo Martens’ in the film: First there is Renzo Martens the artist and second Renzo Martens the consumer. The two Renzos interact with each other to produce the duplicity communicated by the film: I am both the observer and the perpetrator of the African’s exploitation.’ Guerin, ‘Interview with Renzo Martens’. Anthony Howell, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 9. For more information regarding the Bronze Soldier and the rioting that followed its relocation, see Legal Information Centre for Human Rights, Bronze Soldier: April Riots (Tallinn: Legal Information Centre for Human Rights, 2007). T˜onu Kaalep, ‘Zombi Veneetsiasse? Jah’, Ekspress, 16 May 2009. Available at www.ekspress.ee/news/arvamus/arvamus/zombi-veneetsiasse¨ jah.d?id=27688427. Merike Tamm, ‘Pronkss˜oduri Koopia Araviimine Saab Samuti Kunstiteoseks’, Postimees, 11 May 2009. Available at www. postimees.ee/?id=117623 (accessed 11 April, 2011) The Council of Europe published a report on the Bronze Soldier which claims the reopening of hostilities in 2009 was a result of Norman’s actions. The Council of Europe’s report can be found at www.culturalpolicies.net/web/estonia.php?aid=43 (accessed 11 April, 2011) Kristina Norman, ‘Poetic Investigations’, in Andreas Trossek, ed., AfterWar (Tallinn: Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, 2009), p. 27. Tamm, ‘Pronkss˜oduri koopia a¨ raviimine saab samuti kunstiteoseks’. Badiou, Ethics, p. 4. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011), p. 1. Lloyd, ‘The Caress’, p. 71; Johannes Saar, ‘New Wave, Old Shores’, in Anders H¨arm and Hanno Soans, eds, New Wave: Essays (Tallinn: Kunstihoone, 2007), p. 4; Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, Third Text 21: 2 (2007), pp. 369–86, at p. 371. Erik Hagoort, Good Intentions: Judging the Art of Encounter (Amsterdam: Fonds BKVB, 2005), p. 7. Downey, ‘Ethics of Engagement’, p. 595. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 12. Ibid., p. 6.

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‘We will lay out a straightforward ethical path for Dow to follow to compensate the victims, clean up the plant site, and otherwise help make amends for the worst industrial disaster in history. It will be impossible for Dow not to react in some way, which should generate tons of press.’ Taken from theyesmen.org/hijinks/bbcbhopal (accessed 11 May, 2012) Brandon Kelm, ‘Q&A with the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum’, Wired, 15 June 2007. Available at www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/06/qa with the yes/ (accessed 27 May, 2012). Emma John and Alice Fisher, ‘Ethical Pioneers Changing the Way We Live’, The Guardian, 6 February 2011. Available at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/06/ ethical-living-martha-lane-fox. (accessed 29 May, 2012) Demos, ‘Toward a New Institutional Critique’, p. 91. ˙ ˙ Artur Zmijewski, ‘Foreword’, in Joanna Warsza and Artur Zmijewski, eds, Forget Fear (A Reader): 7th Berlin Biennale (Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2012), pp. 10–21, at p. 16.

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9 No Retreat: Performance as Behaviour Modification Jennifer Kalionis

Mike Parr, born in Sydney in 1945, is one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary artists. His primary practices are printmaking and performances that frequently involve violence against the artist’s own body. The latter lie within a marginalized aesthetic category of body art – works that employ the spectacle and pathos associated with pain and suffering for the purpose of generating experience that transcends the ephemeral performative action, and underscores human behaviour at the interface of art and ethics. Since the early 1970s Parr has cast audiences of his performance works as complicit spectators, rendering their responses and very presence in the art space problematic in order to provoke a sense of culpability for both the artist’s transgressive actions and the audience’s own desire to watch those actions unfold. These performances have consistently interrogated moral potentialities in the active reception of art, reproducing and probing social and political power dynamics modelled on contemporary Australian culture. This chapter will focus on Parr’s performances from the early 2000s, in which the artist seeks to expose spectators as being predisposed to violence, intolerance, and prone to conform steadfastly to authority in their dual capacities as art viewers and citizens. These works were produced within a historical moment of political and social 197

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inertia in Australia, under the conservative Liberal-National coalition government (1996–2007), which culminated in a broad acquiescence in the policy and media-driven demonization of minorities and, in particular, of asylum-seekers. During this period an endemic xenophobia, signalled notably by the then prime minister John Howard’s use of the divisive categorization ‘UnAustralian’, sparked Parr to develop his already antagonistic relationship with the art public.1 His performances from this period evoke the harm suffered by people held in detention in Australia and at Guant´anamo Bay in Cuba by explicitly replicating selfharm practices undertaken by detainees, and referencing behaviourmodification techniques akin to those that had been trialled in clinical psychological studies during the 1960s.2 As a form of social realism, Parr’s performances shared experiences of the infliction of trauma in an art space as a response to, and replication of, violence condoned by Australian society against the ‘othered’ asylum seekers and prisoners of war. The works invoke a ‘super-reality’ in which the spectators are both perpetrators and victims.3 This chapter will focus on those performances that Parr specifically intended as a form of behaviour-modification designed to alter what the artist perceives to be a dysfunctional public sphere.4 I shall discuss ways in which Parr exposes the audience to experiences that harness self-loathing as a behaviour-modification tool. I will show how these works cast the spectator as an accomplice, and examine the effect that this may have on the tacit understanding of trust and tolerance that underpins the spectator–artist relationship.

The Spectator as ‘Accomplice’ In contemporary art practice, the ‘accomplice’ spectator exists at the nexus of Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘collaborative’ spectatorship and Edward Scheer’s ‘ethical’ reception of artworks.5 Bourriaud’s model of ‘relational aesthetics’ suggests an ostensibly even and democratic exchange between artist and spectator that has emerged as a facet of contemporary practice over the last 20 years. Since the mid 1990s, Parr’s performative works have used participation as a means of enhancing their socio-political focus. As I shall show, however, the artworks’ accusatory predication towards spectator aversion and guilt 198

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reflects a relationship that is at odds with Bourriaud’s conception of relational art. In a contrasting analysis of Parr’s practice, Scheer develops an ‘ethical’ model of spectator involvement. This is adapted from Luc Boltanski’s examination of moral spectatorship and pity in politics and the media, on the one hand, and trauma theory discourse, on the other.6 This model suggests the possibility of experiencing sublime catharsis through the observation of human despair. Scheer adopts Boltanksi’s view of spectators of aesthetic suffering as being inert and undifferentiated subjects who are spatially, temporally, and functionally segregated from the artist’s autonomous position. This model recapitulates the insular experience of viewing within the art institution that is, I suggest, foreclosed by Parr’s performance works. I shall argue instead that, for Parr, spectators are neither collaborative actors nor ethical bystanders, but accomplices implicated in the violence before them. Such spectators are, in turn, made subject to suffering through awareness of their own social, political, and artistic collusion in such violence. Parr’s antagonistic relationship with audiences calls upon an awareness that the observation of suffering and trauma in art can be a transformative aesthetic encounter, an experience that has been exalted in interdisciplinary studies for its activation of empathic responses towards political and human-rights issues. Artists have long subjected audiences to involvement in discomforting works that are dependent upon collaboration in the form of ‘spectator-manipulation’.7 Boundaries between viewer, artist, and work of art have been constructed and eclipsed throughout art history (informed by peripheral entities such as museums, critics, and theorists), and the provocation of spectatorial antagonism was particularly pronounced in early Surrealism. In his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ manifesto of 1932, Antonin Artaud’s focus on the overt exposure of the spectator to suffering, and his preference for gesture over language in examining social discourse and emotions hitherto ‘repressed in the art of poetry’ is made explicit.8 His writing, which exudes a tormented fixation on the brutality of existence, has been a major influence on Parr. The latter’s study of cruelty in art reflects an Artaudian fixation on the evocation of despair and discomfort in members of the audience.9 Fostering this radical engagement with suffering through performance, Parr eradicates opportunities for his

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audience fully and autonomously to ‘retreat’ to the refuge of aesthetic distance.10 For Parr, the spectator is absorbed into the performative act, manifestly complicit in the suffering of the artist and embroiled in any affective encounter of cruelty simply through his or her presence: ‘If I decide to cut my throat an inch at a time then they [spectators] run the risk of not being able to declare that they were only members of the audience!’11 In 1977 Parr performed Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 (the ‘Armchop’), Rules & Displacement Activities Part III iii. In the photographic documentation of that performance a man (the artist) sits at the edge of a table with a striped tablecloth, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves folded up just above his elbows, and light blue jeans. His left arm rests against the surface of the table. In the next photograph, Parr is holding a small axe in his raised right hand, which is blurred in motion (Fig. 9.1). His face grimaces in rage and pain; he has already struck his left arm with the weapon, and it has been almost completely severed below the elbow. In the bottom right corner of the image, the force of the blow has caused a nearby coffee mug to fall and spill liquid onto the table. At the site of the wound, the skin is torn and bloody muscle is exposed. However, the wounded arm has a strange pallor, and very little blood emanates from the injury itself. Parr’s left arm was amputated at birth.12 For Cathartic Action he had attached a prosthetic limb filled with blood and meat, and hacked at this ‘arm’ with a tomahawk while a recording of his father’s voice played in the background.13 In another photograph Parr faces the audience in a post-performance discussion; he debriefs the group while wearing a knitted ‘pink arm’ that extends from the stump of his amputated limb.14 Despite this post-performance discussion, Parr attempted to ‘keep the audience at bay’, to accentuate the barriers between event and audience, and to heighten both the public’s aversion towards the action and their voyeuristic position in relation to it.15 In a post-performance photograph, many spectators appear with downcast eyes, and some with their heads in their hands, still shocked by Parr’s apparent severing of his arm with a weapon in an art space. Cathartic Action highlighted the vulnerability of the spectators before an aggressive and deceptive act. Parr continued to explore this psychological exposure through spatiotemporal dissections of the gallery space that were designed to trigger audience participation and to

NO RETREAT: PERFORMANCE AS BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION Figure 9.1 Mike Parr, Rules & Displacement Activities Part III, 1977–1983 iii. Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 (the ‘Armchop’), 1977.

problematize the privileged space of the art institution. His 1994 installation at the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Fathers II (The Law of the Image), for example, consisted of an unlit maze set in the gallery space of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation. Audience members ventured into the darkened maze only to discover that there was no exit, and that they had to navigate their way back to the entrance in order to leave.16 Entrapped, the audience was thrown into near-sightlessness and rendered physically and psychologically vulnerable in an act of antagonism that prompted fear and panic as coherent responses to the artwork. In this case, concealment and obstruction imposed sensory deprivation and defencelessness upon the audience, thereby making their reception of the work the very focus of the piece. The maze is a strong metaphor for Parr’s practice: a trap that satirically and somewhat maliciously ensnares the audience in ways that render visible their reactions to the artwork.17 The calculated estrangement of the audience from familiarity and security in Fathers II 201

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gave the anxious spectators no quarter. It was an articulation of anguish, an action against the artworld that pushed the audience into emotional disquiet while simultaneously calling upon the historical and formal qualities of performance art to express the conceptual development of the artist’s own practice.18

Trust If the spectator is not unsettled by the artwork, it is a failure. If the spectator is only unsettled by it, then the spectator is a failure.19 Anthony Julius

Discomfort and offence are anticipated, expected, and sometimes even desired by spectators when observing contemporary art, but only to the extent that this experience does not have a harmful or traumatic impact.20 As Kathryn Brown writes, contemporary spectators in liberal societies are often willing to tolerate an offensive artwork in cases where offence acts as an amplification of aesthetic meaning.21 Brown traces this underlying tolerance to John Stuart Mill’s ‘harm principle’ in On Liberty (1859), based upon the spectator’s faith that the artist may produce aesthetic material that might challenge, unsettle, or offend, but will do no physical or psychological harm.22 Similarly, Ihab Hassan writes that trust is a ‘shared belief’ that underpins and affects the audience’s observance and participation in the ‘production, transmission and consumption’ of art.23 My contention is that Parr’s performances incorporate behaviourmodification techniques and cast spectators as accomplices to violence and torture in ways that problematize the trust that underpins the relationship between spectator, artist, and artwork. Parr’s use of this model suggests that he identifies a dysfunctional element within an audience that is at ease with witnessing and participating in the artist’s pain and, by extension, the social injustices such pain reflects. It is arguable that individuals may diffuse personal responsibility for their behaviour when they are among a group, and this is one of the criticisms that Parr makes of his audience.24 In his politically focused works, audience members are implicated as guilty witnesses and, more broadly, as impotent citizens whose connivance in the artwork mirrors real-world culpabilities: the spectator’s failure to intervene in the 202

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violence incorporated into the artwork reflects a greater collapse of social interactions between human beings. Parr seeks to provide a contextualized critique of the social systems to which the spectator belongs, to implicate the spectator as an accomplice both literally, through his or her participation in the artwork, and figuratively, through allusions to the guilt engendered by adopting a voyeuristic position in relation to the performance. But it is worth pausing to consider whether the enlivening of such a negative emotional experience may also have adverse consequences in the social context that Parr targets in his works. In evolutionary terms, these negative emotions ‘serve no survival function’, and may become destructive when they are enlarged within an individual’s experience.25 In the remainder of this chapter, I shall consider how, in Parr’s work, guilt and shame associated with the act of torture may generate destructive feelings of severe regret and self-loathing in the audience. Such self-loathing at their involvement or dysfunctional status may become the keystone for an aesthetic experience that is predicated upon sensations of affect, recoil, regret, fear, and guilt. I contend, however, that these sensations may have damaging effects beyond the outcomes intended by the artist. In order to develop this point, I shall now turn to Parr’s performances that occurred under the government led by Australia’s Liberal-National prime minister, John Howard. During the four-term Howard government that began in 1996, intolerant political and social reactions towards legal and illegal immigrants flourished. Politically, this was reflected in the imposition of severe restrictions on, and the vilification of, people arriving on the nation’s shores to seek asylum.26 Australia’s immigration policies have been contentious since the enactment of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 – a notorious piece of legislation that was commonly referred to as the ‘White Australia Policy’. The policies relating to Australian detention centres remain controversial, and mental illness, as well as acts of protest and self-harm, continue to occur among detainee populations.27 In January 2002, the Guardian first reported that 60 asylum seekers in detention in Australia had sewn their lips together in protest over the delay in processing their visa applications.28 This horrific self-harm increased public debate over the treatment of refugees, and highlighted escalating social and political intolerance

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towards those seeking asylum in Australia. Parr responded to the ongoing horror of the detention centres in a series of performances that used his body and gesture in recognition of the insufficiency of language fully to address this trauma.29 These performances may be interpreted as physical confessions of Parr’s own sense of complicity as an Australian citizen in the treatment of asylum-seekers and the invasion of Iraq.30 The lengthy duration of these works forms a narrative engagement with the audience that emerges from witnessing the physical and emotional experiences of the artist. Parr makes detailed preparations for these performances, including procedures for triggering and sustaining the violence against his own person and for maintaining general safeguards for the artist throughout the actions. His audience members are not afforded the same physical or ethical protections. Instead, the witnessing and perpetuation of the artist’s intense suffering converge to form the focal point of these artworks. Although Scheer considers time integral to Parr’s work (on the basis that spectators may be moved to respond ethically after witnessing suffering over a lengthy period), it may be rare for an audience member to be present for the entire duration of the performance. As a result, the affective outcome of these performances is unmeasured.31 Many spectators may leave the gallery with an unresolved experience of the performances, and those who only know the artwork through its documentation may also be relieved of the psychological impact of the artworks’ duration.32 While spectators attending these performances are often aware of Parr’s performative style, they might not expect to become active accomplices to the suffering of the artist, or to be exposed as a causal link in the perpetuation of broader social ills. While audiences may tolerate an artist’s actions within the extensive spectrum of artistic expression in contemporary art, in this case they are also manipulated into an experience of affective suffering for which they have become responsible by their simple presence, and without their consent. In Malevich (A Political Arm) Performance for as Long as Possible (2002), a performance at Artspace in Sydney, Parr sat on a chair pushed against a white gallery wall, blindfolded with black tape and clad in a dark suit, with his right arm propped against the wall and pierced in several places through the forearm skin by long nails. Parr was presented to the audience as an object for consideration, nailed to the wall like a traditional work of art and exhibited among other objects, including

NO RETREAT: PERFORMANCE AS BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION Figure 9.2 Mike Parr, Malevich (A Political Arm), performance for as long as possible, 3–5 May 2002.

a redacted dictionary of ‘Australianisms’, almost entirely blacked-out but for selected offensive terms that reflect current social tensions.33 Trickles of blood dripped from these wounds down the wall, against which also hung Malewitch (April 2002), a framed off-white sheet of paper onto which the word ‘MALEVICH’ had been repeatedly printed (Fig. 9.2). Through the invocation of the radical aesthetic of Russian Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich (in particular the monochromatic Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918), Parr highlights discriminatory social and political attitudes to immigrants and asylumseekers, suggesting that the exclusionary tests inherent in the ‘White Australia Policy’ are entrenched in the national consciousness and the behaviour of many of the country’s citizens.34 Developing Malevich’s radical aesthetic, Parr’s performance is highly political, embedded in social realities and critical of the role of art and spectatorship in contemporary Australian society. As the artist puts it: ‘Maybe art should be “bad for society” because in this context nothing good can come of illustration.’35 205

INTERACTIVE CONTEMPORARY ART Figure 9.3 Mike Parr, Close the Concentration Camps, six-hour performance, 15 June 2002.

Parr questioned the social acceptance of the vilification of refugees, and the very existence of detention centres, in the six-hour performance and mixed media installation Close the Concentration Camps (2002). Prior to the performance, in an action reminiscent of the early instructional work Have a branding iron made up with the word ‘ARTIST’. Brand this word on your body (1973), Parr had his leg branded with the word ‘ALIEN’ – a slur commonly associated with undocumented or illegal immigrants.36 Additionally, excerpts from The Immigration Detention Centres Inspection Report were projected onto a wall in an adjacent ‘waiting’ room.37 Recognizing the power of gesture over language in these political circumstances, and concerned that the lip-sewing by the refugees had become a symbol loaded with unmerited negative connotations, he had his face sewn until it was almost unrecognizable (Fig. 9.3).38 The 30 hour performance Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture) (2003), was staged in two parts. For the first 24 hours (Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi), Parr sat motionless and silent before the audience, with an Australian flag (a small version, often brandished patriotically at national celebrations and sporting events) affixed to the remaining portion of his semi-amputated left arm as if 206

NO RETREAT: PERFORMANCE AS BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION Figure 9.4 Mike Parr, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture), 30 hour performance, 2–3 May 2003.

in mid-wave.39 Again, Parr had his assistant criss-cross surgical thread across his whole face, binding his forehead, ears, cheeks and chin.40 Amelia Jones interprets Parr’s acts of self-harm through actions such as branding and face-sewing as a politically productive reaction to physical wounding by asylum-seekers. She suggests that Parr opens himself up to the ‘Other’ in ‘an art world context’ and invites the audience to become politically active through witnessing the event.41 Blood dripped from the facial wounds onto his crisp white shirt, resonating with the deep red expanse of wall text containing excerpts from media coverage of the Iraq incursion42 (Fig. 9.4). Headlines and phrases from national media articles covering the invasion, such as ‘BLOODBATH’, ‘HUNDREDS OF VICTIMS IN COFFINS’ and ‘FILLING HOLES IN A BULLET-RIDDLED NATION’, were printed on the gallery wall behind the artist. Parr maintained a downcast expression before what Scheer has termed a ‘vast field of lyrical aggression’.43 These two performances explored the paranoia and xenophobic confusion surrounding the notion of ‘Australianness’ (a notion made palpable by Howard’s call for a ‘mateship’ clause to be added to 207

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the Constitution) while asylum-seekers languished in detention and the government accused stranded refugees of throwing their children from their boats.44 The chasm between the national and international constructions of a sunny and welcoming ‘Australia’ and the acerbic intolerance fostered by conservative and far-right political leaders during this period was highlighted in Aussie, Aussie, Aussie by the contrast between the vitriol of the wall text, the use of the national flag, and the title of the work, which captured a favoured sporting ‘battle cry’ of Australians, ‘Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!’ For Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, (class-related) patriotism and sport offer individuals an opportunity to be passive in a collective for the purpose of meeting ‘a social demand’.45 Similarly, in Parr’s work, the use of a sporting analogy confronts audience members with their membership of two social groups: the patriotic sports crowd referenced in the title and the political community responsible for the denigration and detention of refugees. This dual sense of ‘belonging’ was complicated by the second half of the performance (Democratic Torture) in which Parr sought to further his critique of the plight of detainees and the invasion of Iraq through the exploration of the eagerness of the national, international, and online art publics to engage in acts of torture.46 Electrodes linked to a computer were placed on Parr’s face, and for six hours spectators streaming the performance live on the internet were invited to ‘touch a hotspot on their screens’, thereby exerting their ‘democratic right’ to torture the artist.47 These devices were triggered approximately 25 times during this part of the performance, and continued until the server crashed.48 The cyber public tortured Parr, confirming that, given the appropriate conditions, people are indeed capable of levels of destructive obedience in pursuit of traumatic ends.49 Through the anonymity and distance of the internet, the cyber viewer’s gaze is largely unknowable, and his or her response or compliance may pose a threat to the ethical spectatorship suggested by Scheer. The torture imagery and experience in Democratic Torture solicits the gaze of internet users searching for sadism as entertainment. While this performance provides a strong commentary on spectatorship within the gallery space, once it is released into the virtual world it is removed from the safeguards of the institutional framework.50 The voyeuristic position of the internet spectator who seeks violent or traumatic imagery has been

Behaviour-Modification and Audience Self-Loathing Kingdom Come And/Or Punch Holes in Body Politic, Performance for as Long as Possible (2005), borrowed techniques from behaviour-modification experimentation and the visual lexicon of torture and containment at Guant´anamo Bay. The two-part performance sought to explore cooperative, surreptitious violence against the artist perpetrated by viewers who were, at least initially, unaware of the full effect of their actions.52 Parr was theatrically bathed in a wide square of light; a discarded shoe and sock lay beside his bare foot; a metal tag with an electrical wire was affixed to one of his toes.53 He wore a bright orange suit, of the shade worn by non-compliant detainees at Guant´anamo Bay which then held Australia’s David Hicks.54 Parr sat or quietly paced the performance area, waiting for the assembled audience to cross into the lit area.55 Once this occurred, the artist was immediately electrocuted – a shock that persisted until the viewer moved away.56 At the point of electrocution, Parr lurched forward from his seat and glared menacingly, purposively, at the audience. The interactive elements of the action were not disclosed in the publicity, and spectators received no other warning.57 The aim of the performance was to reveal that Parr’s electrocution was a consequence of the spectator’s thirst for interactivity or ‘need to see what is happening’.58 The suffering of the artist lasted ‘for as long as possible’, or until Parr’s agony was so intense that he shouted ‘No’ (his only use of language), a plea that he equated to the act of confession in military torture.59 In adjoining rooms, a ‘Photoshop recapitulation’ that had captured stills of Parr grimacing and in pain was projected onto the gallery walls.60 This continued into the second half of the performance, Punch Holes in Body Politic, in which these projections of Parr’s image were pierced by computer-generated holes. Kingdom Come is rich with the ‘iconography of martyrdom’, the visual language of the Passion story, and references to the War on Terror, detainees, and freedom fighters. Its enactment of torture echoes state-sanctioned violence and Stanley Milgram’s famous Behavioural

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‘domesticated’.51 These performances use behaviour-modification and torture techniques to manipulate the role of the spectator in order to compel an aesthetic response from the audience.

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Study of Obedience of the early 1960s, which examined ‘destructive obedience’ among unsuspecting subjects.61 In Milgram’s experiment, participants were deceived into thinking that they were effectively acting as research assistants to test the ‘effect of punishment on memory’.62 The participants asked a concealed ‘learner’ a series of questions, and were commanded by a figure of apparent scientific authority to administer increasingly intense shocks to the ‘learner’ for each wrong answer given.63 The ‘learner’ apparently receiving the shocks was an actor and, although the subjects carrying out the experiment could not see the learner, his or her shrieks pleading for the electrocution to end were clearly audible.64 Milgram found that ‘people will behave in ways they typically repudiate if a legitimate authority accepts responsibility for the effects of their conduct’.65 Conversely, there is a possibility that the participant’s willingness to shock the ‘learner’ may have been enhanced by their enthusiasm to serve as assistants in the task (a sense of ‘displaced responsibility’).66 Similarly, contemporary art audiences may be reluctant to disturb a performance that conflates the responsibility for the infliction and witnessing of torture with the aestheticized experience of pain. They may abide the use of torture in performance art, and even enthusiastically engage in the action within an art space that ‘sanctions’ such interaction.67 The intensification of the act of reception through internet participation further dislocates the cyber audience and the artist from the space of the art gallery and the established relationship of trust between these parties. Parr meets this fervour for artistic expression with antagonism, through violence that draws upon experimental psychological techniques as a form of ‘treatment’ to alter the audiences’ role and responses in the gallery space and in society. Estrangement through provocation and violence is, arguably, an experience expected by contemporary audiences. Furthermore, artworks that operate within an aesthetic of trauma may be defended as reflections of the sociopolitical climate in which they have been made. The witnessing of pain and mental or physical duress may also be perceived as a transformative experience with which all viewers can associate through shared experience – an understanding promoted by Scheer in his ethical spectatorship model. Conversely, is must be acknowledged that witnesses to these performances have become perpetrators of torture (often unwittingly).

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Torture, even in performance, is ‘synonymous with cruelty’, and Parr sits as a traumatized ‘fact’ before a guilty public, accusatory and unforgiving.68 Kingdom Come is not a conventional behaviourmodification experiment, on the grounds that it is undertaken in an uncontrolled environment and lacks any scientific methodology or accountability on the part of the artist or art space. Nevertheless, it is designed as a form of ethical ‘treatment’ to alter the audiences’ expectations of the gallery space, and to jolt them into empathy. However, theorist Frank M¨oller, discussing photographs of torture in Iraq, cites Horst Bredekamp’s assertion that, if the production of an image involves torture, the spectator is viewed as responsible and culpable for the offence through the act of viewing.69 Similarly, for James Elkins, in his analysis of theories of transgression and the viewing of Chinese ling’chi execution images, the act of looking at art that depicts real harm both ‘harms and unsettles art history’.70 In similar fashion, it can be argued that performances such as Kingdom Come expose spectators’ vulnerability to cruelty and monstrous acts, and reveal an innate predisposition towards destructive actions, ‘given appropriate social conditions’.71 In the wider context encompassing asylum-seekers and prisoners of war, perhaps the spectator’s failure to intervene in a piece of performance art reflects a failure of social interactions more broadly. Parr’s performances centre on an ethical challenge to the reception of art and on the audience’s response to suffering in an emotionally driven manner that cannot be weakened through a Kantian approach of aesthetic disinterestedness.72 The works exist in what Giorgio Agamben defines as a ‘grey zone’, where the complicated boundaries between the infliction and experiencing of pain are difficult to differentiate.73 Parr’s performances utilize psychological or psychosocial antagonism to challenge spectatorship, and seek to control the reception of the artist’s gesture within a contextualized critique of the social systems to which the spectator belongs. This is cemented by the artist’s hierarchical position (as both victim and impresario) as he signals the social illness of apathy and the passive acceptance of violence that leaves the audience in need of treatment or modification. Although politically effective, works like Kingdom Come are uncontrollable as regards both the immediate response of the audience and the viewer’s ongoing willingness to trust in art, the artist, and the

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gallery.74 Spectators’ aversion to, and discomfort in, the imposition upon them of an accomplice role may endure beyond the antagonism of the performance itself. I have argued that the ‘accomplice spectator’ model describes the audience’s role in Parr’s works of the Howard-government era, particularly in those performances that employ techniques borrowed from behaviour-modification experimentation. Parr’s antagonism towards the act of reception, and towards the audience, is evident in his implication of the spectator as a collaborator in performances such as Democratic Torture and Kingdom Come. These works expose the destructive emotions that underpin their production, but can also undermine the trust that binds artist and spectator. The conventional, clinical response of a detached and disinterested gaze is prohibited by the violence and guilt that troubles our assumptions about the autonomy of art in relation to artists’ responsibilities to their audiences. This chapter does not accept Parr’s work uncritically; although these performances seek to awaken political action on behalf of asylumseekers, this plea is abstracted through the re-enactment of trauma from within the rarefied art institution. I contend that performances like Kingdom Come affect audiences not because of any professed universal transfiguration of pain and suffering, but because they rely on cruelty aimed at eliciting impulses of culpability and empathy, and because they generate a sense of self-loathing on the part of the audience. More troublingly, these performances may abuse the relationship of tolerance that exists between the audience and the artist, because the experience of harm lies at their foundation.

Notes 1

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The term ‘UnAustralian’ is used colloquially and pejoratively to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour, and between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in relation to individuals. The phrase is a historical construct built upon a national anxiety about identity, and is frequently espoused by politicians and the media to establish a discursive exclusion of individuals, groups, and acts deemed contrary to ‘Australian’ conduct and custom. Paul Alberts and Jacqueline Millner, ‘Introduction: Unaustralian Activities’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16: 1 (2002), pp. 7–11; Larissa Dubecki. ‘Why it’s Australian to be un-Australian’, The Age, 26

3

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5

6

7

8

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2

January 2008. Mike Parr, ‘Mike Parr – UnAustralian: Sydney, November 26, 2003’, 2004: Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Contemporary Photomedia (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2004), pp. 30–1, at p. 30. Mike Parr, ‘Hold Your Breath’, artist talk for the Gestures and Procedures exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 8 September 2010, n.p. Parr stated that his performances are broadly intended as a form of ‘behaviour-modification’, and that he seeks to deny spectators the ability to give an ‘appropriate emotional response’. Horst Bredekamp, ‘The Audience as Prisoner: Reflections on the Activity of the Object’, Institute of Advanced Studies lecture at Princeton University, 2 March 2010, n.p. Garry Martin and Joseph Pear, Behaviour Modification: What It Is and How To Do It, 4th edn (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 8, 380. B.F. Skinner’s concept of operant conditioning, and his belief that through positive reinforcement human behaviour can be modified in order to create a better society, underpins the concept of behavioural modification. Grant Kester, The One and The Many (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 29; Edward Scheer, The Infinity Machine (Melbourne: Schwartz Media, 2009), p. 130. See Sophie Anne Oliver, ‘Trauma, Bodies, and Performance Art: Towards an Embodied Ethics of Seeing’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24: 1 ( January 2010), pp. 119–29, at pp. 119–20; and Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Kenneth Coutts-Smith quoted in Mary Beth Inverso, ‘Beyond Offending the Audience: Violating the Audience Body, Contemporary Theatre Review 5: 1 (1996), pp. 17–25, at p. 20. Parr’s antagonistic stance towards the audience reflects sentiments expressed earlier, in Shusaku Arakawa’s AntiHappening (1960), in which the artist trapped the audience on a ledge in darkness, as well as by Chris Burden’s reflections upon the role of the audience after his performance, Shoot (1971), and the extent of the revelatory violence of the public in Marina Abramovi´c’s Rhythm 0 (1974). Clayton Eshleman ‘Introduction’, in Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period by Antonin Artaud, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman, with Bernard Bador (Boston, MA: Exact Change, 1995), pp. 1–48, at pp. 40, 11. For Artaud’s influence over Parr’s practice, see Edward Scheer and Nicholas Tsoutas, ‘Breaking through Language: Interview with Mike Parr’, in Edward Scheer, ed., 100 Years of Cruelty: Essays on Artaud (Sydney: Power Publications/Artspace, 2000), pp. 279–304.

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10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

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Parr states that he purposefully makes it ‘impossible for the audience to retreat into a theatrical experience’, but rather forces the audience to be ‘participants in a life situation, which was the antithesis of art . . . involved in a formative experience rather than a finished artwork’. Mike Parr, ‘Mike Parr, 59. Rules & Displacement Activities Part I, xxiv Discussion 1 Statement 2’, in Linda Michael, ed., Mike Parr Performances 1971–2008 (Melbourne: Schwartz City, 2008), n.p. Edward Scheer, ‘A Vast Field of Lyrical Aggression: Politics and Ethical Spectatorship in Recent Durational Art by Mike Parr’, Broadsheet 33: 2 (2004), pp. 23–6, at p. 23. Scheer, Infinity Machine, p. 28; Scheer and Tsoutas, ‘Breaking through Language’, p. 282. Parr, ‘Hold Your Breath’, n.p. Mike Parr, ‘96. Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 (the ‘Armchop’), Rules & Displacement Activities Part III iii’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. The pink ‘arm’ was knitted for the performance by Parr’s sister, artist Julie Rrap. Scheer and Tsoutas, ‘Breaking through Language’, p. 284. A similar installation, Fathers III (Subject Verb Object) (1996) was in the exhibition No Exit at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1996. This concept is explained in detail in Parr’s notes for a performance installation proposal for The Glass Labyrinth, in Mike Parr, ‘The Glass Labyrinth, 1998’ ( January 1998), in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. Scheer and Tsoutas, ‘Breaking through Language’, p. 302. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 32. Ibid., p. 33; Kester, The One and The Many, p. 36. Kathryn Brown, ‘Tolerating Art in a Liberal Society’, International Journal of the Arts in Society 4: 3 (2009), pp. 155–63, at p. 163. Julius describes an ‘aesthetic cooperation’ that exists between artist and audience (Transgressions, p. 164). Ihab Hassan, ‘Aesthetics in the Age of Globalization: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust’, in Ian North, ed., Visual Animals: Crossovers, Evolution and New Aesthetics (Parkside: Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 2007), pp. 175–86, at p. 179. Brown quotes Richard Dees’s analysis of the importance of trust to tolerance, in an examination of the artist–spectator relationship (‘Tolerating Art in a Liberal Society’, p. 161). Albert Bandura, ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities’, Personality and Social Psychology Review 3: 3 (1999), pp. 193–209, at p. 198.

26

27 28

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31 32

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35 36

Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (Westminster: Bantam Books, 2004), p. 143. The Howard government enforced the policy of mandatory detention (initiated by the preceding Labour government) with fervour, and used the divisive issue of asylum-seekers and border protection in the wake of the fall of the New York City World Trade Center in 2001 as votewinning election issues. For further detail, see Robert Manne, ‘The Howard Years: A Political Interpretation’, in Robert Manne, ed., The Howard Years (Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2004), pp. 37–8. Manne, ‘Howard Years’, p. 33. See Belinda Goldsmith, ‘Asylum Seekers Sew Lips Together’, the Guardian, 19 January 2002; and Christine Jackman, ‘Lips Fall on Deaf Ears’, Sunday Herald Sun, 20 January 2002. Alastair Morgan, “ ‘A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence”: Agamben and Adorno on Gesture’, Law Critique 20 (August 2009), pp. 299–307, at p. 303. Correspondence from Mike Parr to Artspace, ‘Instructions for Managing Performance’, 5 April 2005, ‘Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic, Performance for as Long as Possible’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. Scheer, Infinity Machine, p. 17. Additionally, the repetition of the act of suffering may also affect audience members who have experienced trauma in their personal lives, and whose experiences may trigger a shameful submission to the violence Parr constructs within the gallery. See Alexander McFarlane and Bessel A. van der Kolk, ‘Trauma and Its Challenge to Society’, in Alexander C. McFarlane, Bessel A. van der Kolk, and Lars Weisaeth, eds, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 24–46, at p. 31. The text was entitled The Australian National Dictionary: A Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical Principles. See Scheer, Infinity Machine, p. 111. Russell Storer, ‘Interview with Mike Parr and Adam Geczy’ in Russell Storer, Bleed Bled Said (Sydney: Power Institute: Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, 2003), pp. 25–48, at p. 31; and Scheer, ‘Vast Field of Lyrical Aggression’, pp. 24, 25. Correspondence from Mike Parr to David Bromfield, 24 May 2002, ‘Close the Concentration Camps’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. David Bromfield writes of the association between branding and the notion of stigmata in this performance. Correspondence from David

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38 39 40

41

42 43 44

45 46 47

48 49

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Bromfield to Mike Parr, 26 May 2002, in Linda Michael, ed., Mike Parr Performances 1971–2008 (Melbourne: Schwartz City, 2008), n.p. Correspondence from Mike Parr to David Bromfield, 24 May 2002, Michael, ed., Mike Parr Performances 1971–2008, n.p. The projected document was the Parliament of Australia Joint Standing Committee on Migration, Not the Hilton: Immigration Detention Centres: Inspection Report (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2000). Scheer, ‘Vast Field of Lyrical Aggression’, p. 23. Mike Parr, UnAustralian (2003), Artspace, Woolloomooloo, N.S.W. Australia. Scheer, ‘Vast Field of Lyrical Aggression’, p. 25. Michelle Helmrich, ‘Mike Parr: Walking at the Edge of a Cliff Face’, exhibition catalogue, LATEMOUTH, Mike Parr Works on Paper 1987– 2003 (University of Queensland, Brisbane: University Art Museum, 2003), pp. 9–10. Amelia Jones, ‘Performing the Wounded Body: Pain, Affect and the Radical Relationality of Meaning’, Parallax 15: 4 (2009), pp. 45–67, at p. 52. Australian troops have been involved in the Iraq War since 20 March 2003. Edward Scheer, ‘Australia’s Post-Olympic Apocalypse?’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30: 1 (2008), pp. 42–56, at p. 47. Howard and poet Les Murray drafted a controversial ‘mateship clause’ in a revised preamble to the Australian Constitution during the 1999 Constitutional Referendum. Bruce Stone, ‘A Preamble to the Australian Constitution: A Criticism of the Recent Debate’, Australian Journal of Political Science 35: 2 (2000), pp. 291–7, at p. 292. See also n. 28. Bowen Paulle, Bart van Heerikhuizen and Mustafa Emirbayer, ‘Elias and Bourdieu’, Journal of Classical Sociology 12: 1 (2012), pp. 69–93, at p. 84. Helmrich, ‘Walking at the Edge of a Cliff Face’, p. 9. Russell Storer, ‘Bleed Bled Said: Adam Geczy and Mike Parr’, in Michael Carter, ed., Bleed Bled Said: Adam Geczy and Mike Parr (Sydney: Power Publications, 2003), pp. 1–24, at p. 4; and Scheer, ‘Australia’s PostOlympic Apocalypse?’, p. 6. Scheer, ‘Vast Field of Lyrical Aggression’, p. 25; Scheer, ‘Australia’s PostOlympic Apocalypse?’, p. 47. Bessel A. Der Holk and Alexander McFarlane, ‘The Black Hole of Trauma’, in Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth, eds, Traumatic Stress The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford Press, c1996), pp. 3–23, at p. 8.

51 52 53

54 55

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57 58

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Sue Tait, ‘Pornographies of Violence? Internet Spectatorship on Body Horror’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 25: 1 (2008), pp. 91–111, at p. 103. Ibid., p. 109. Robert Buch, Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 38. Correspondence from Mike Parr to Celina Jeffrey, 11 March 2005, ‘Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic: Performance for as Long as Possible’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. Ibid. Tom Burvill, “‘Unassumable Responsibility”: Watching Mike Parr’, paper presented at the proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (2006), pp. 1–4, at p. 2. Scheer, ‘Australia’s Post-Olympic Apocalypse?’, p. 49. Artaud received electro-shock therapy to treat his childhood meningitis, and again when he was a patient at the Rodez asylum. Clayton Eshleman ‘Introduction’, pp. 2–3. Burvill, ‘Unassumable Responsibility’, p. 3. Correspondence from Mike Parr to Celina Jeffrey, 11 March 2005, ‘Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic: Performance for as Long as Possible’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. Correspondence from Mike Parr to Artspace, ‘Instructions for Managing Performance’, 5 April 2005, ‘Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic: Performance for as Long as Possible’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. Correspondence from Mike Parr to Celina Jeffrey, 11 March 2005, ‘Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic: Performance for as Long as Possible’, in Michael, Mike Parr Performances, n.p. Stanley Milgram, The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments (New York: City University of New York, 1977), p. 139; Helmrich, ‘Walking at the Edge of a Cliff Face’, pp. 9–10; and Arthur G. Miller, Barry E. Collins, and Diana E. Brief, ‘Perspectives on Obedience to Authority: The Legacy of the Milgram Experiments’, Journal of Social Issues 51: 3 (1995), pp. 1–19, at p. 1. A similar examination of obedience, the Stanford Prison Study, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. See Philip Zimbardo, ‘On the Ethics of Intervention in Human Psychological Research: With Special Reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment’, Cognition 2: 2 (1973), pp. 243–56, at p. 243. Milgram observed that more than half of the participants in the

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70 71 72 73

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experiment administered the maximum punishment to the ‘victim’ under the guise of a learning experiment. Miller, Collins, and Brief, ‘Perspectives on Obedience to Authority’, p. 1. Ibid. Ibid. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (London: Tavistock, 1974), p. 3; and Bandura, ‘Moral Disengagement’, p. 196. Bandura, ‘Moral Disengagement’, p. 196. Inverso, ‘Beyond Offending the Audience’, p. 18. Mike Parr, ‘Some Notes On My Work 1970–1974’, Michael, ed., Mike Parr Performances 1971–2008, n.p. Frank M¨oller quotes art historian Steven Eisenman: the Abu Ghraib effect is ‘a kind of moral blindness . . . that allows [the US public and the amateur photographers at Abu Ghraib] to ignore, or even to justify, however partially or provisionally, the facts of degradation and brutality manifest in the pictures’. See Frank M¨oller, ‘The Looking/Not Looking Dilemma’, Review of International Studies 35: 4 (October 2009), pp. 781–94, at p. 781. James Elkins, ‘The Very Theory of Transgression’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 5: 2 (2004), pp. 5–19, at p. 6. Bandura, ‘Moral Disengagement’, p. 200. Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), p. 11. Elizabeth Dauphin´ee, ‘The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery’, Security Dialogue 38: 2 ( June 2007), pp. 139–54, at p. 151. B.T. Lynch and S.J.M.M. Alberti, ‘Legacies of Prejudice: Racism, CoProduction and Radical Trust in the Museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship 25: 1 (March 2010), pp. 13–35, at p. 30. Jessica Wolfendale, ‘The Myth of “Torture Lite”’, Ethics and International Affairs 23: 1 (2009), pp. 47–61, at p. 51.

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10 The Art of Experience in the Age of a Service Economy Juliet Steyn

It is hard not to notice the ever-increasing prevalence with which art and museums emphasize experience as the modus operandi of contemporary exhibitions.1 Visitors are encapsulated by – often in – the work on display, transformed into participants, actors, explorers, players, anything but spectators, in the name of ‘accessible experiences’ of art. Antony Jackson and Jenny Kidd have recently argued: ‘Visits to museums . . . have in recent years become (not least in promotional rhetoric) less about the object and more about the experience’.2 They claim these encounters are ‘performative’, in the sense derived from Erving Goffman. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argued that all life is performed, and public life is the theatre of performance.3 Jackson and Kidd extend Goffman’s analysis to propose that the ‘nature’ of the site, the architecture, and the display elicit responses from art viewers similar to those experienced by theatre audiences.4 Can we infer from this suggestion a deliberate intention to create experiences for museum spectators that are not only akin to those created by theatrical presentations, but also assumed to be identical with life? Experience is deemed to be an end in itself. Thus, the idea of aesthetic experience as a distinctive and differentiated category is being eroded. 221

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The museum website for the exhibition High Arctic (National Maritime Museum, London, 2011–2) claims that the interactive space of the exhibition ‘turns visitors into explorers’.5 In her paper, ‘Interactivity and Audience Experience in the Modern Museum: Discussing Findings from [a] Case Study on the High Arctic Immersive Installation’, Irida Ntalla suggests that museum visitors, prompted by interactivity, are engaged in ‘a personal arctic expedition’.6 From her empirical evidence, gleaned from visitors’ questionnaires, she infers that affect is embodied rather than abstract. The lived body is interpreted as the holistic site of an experiencing subject. Ntalla goes on to suggest that the museum visitor becomes ‘an active self’ through the experience of this exhibition.7 On the face of it this might appear benign, but it might also disguise a tyrannical design which jeopardizes communicative knowledge. Ntalla’s claim rests on the assumption that experience is entirely the attribute of a subject who is captivated, captured, and merged into and by the exhibition ‘experience’. The problematic nature of the relationship between the experiencing subject, the object, and the installation that precipitates experience is thus obfuscated. This chapter explores and questions prevailing notions of exhibition ‘experiences’, and how these percolate into the spectator’s expectations and assumptions about art and the institutions that house it. I try to distinguish between experience that is aestheticized and aesthetic experience, and to explore the varieties of what is commonly referred to as ‘experience’. I have identified three main themes: from object to experience, curating experience, and reclaiming experience. I begin by reflecting upon the spectator in relation to art in the ‘white cube’. I then consider Nicholas Serota’s post-modernization of Tate Modern, and then attempt to conjure up another ‘experience’ through a remembered account of different modalities of experience in La Chambre Claire (1997), by Susan Trangmar.8 Finally, with recourse to Jacques Ranci`ere’s contention that the question of the spectator is at the core of debate on the relationship between art and politics, I ponder his notion of the ‘emancipated spectator’, thereby returning to the experience of the spectator.9 In his magisterial book, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme, Martin Jay explores Western discourses of experience from the sixteenth century

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onwards.10 His research reveals the multiple and contradictory meanings and values that have been attached to notions of experience over the last 500 years. It can be inferred that some thinkers deploy experience as the opposite of anything that threatens spontaneity and creativity, escaping the mystification of ideology. Others, by contrast, have mistrusted its very association with chance, contingency, and the disarray of everyday life. Experience has been seen as an impediment to both true knowledge and its realization. Jay uncovers the contradictions and uncertainties of understanding experience in its many guises. In the dark days of European fascism, Walter Benjamin deplored the dearth of human experience.11 Theodor Adorno warned that even the possibility of experience was in peril.12 More recently, Giorgio Agamben has cautioned that ‘the question of experience can be approached nowadays only with the acknowledgement that it is no longer accessible to us’.13 Meanwhile, Jean Baudrillard has argued that ‘hyperreality’ – the state in which the distinctions between the real and unreal have disappeared – may have succeeded in depriving us of experience entirely.14 Bearing in mind of the postulate that human experience is threatened, if not already extinguished, the question that now has to be asked is: ‘[E]xperience in the service of what end?’15 How we might reply depends on the ways in which experience is deployed in current usage, as well as on the ambiguity that lies at its very heart.

From Object to Experience Sensory disinterestedness was the primary criterion of the aesthetic experience of the spectator in the autonomous art of the Kantian tradition of modernity. This notion of experience functioned as the normative guide for museum practice in the twentieth century. Exhibited in the tactical manner of the ubiquitous ‘white cube’, autonomous art was to offer itself to the spectator as if for the first time, revealed as a work of art in pure visibility, manifested in luminous privacy. Aestheticized detachment was to provide the spectator with a place for contemplation away from the stress and tedium of daily life. Presupposed here was a disinterested but actively engaged subject in possession of the knowledge necessary to prompt a distinctive aesthetic experience. 223

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Two of the major proponents of autonomous art in late Modernism, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, virulently defended the specialized function of aesthetics. Greenberg’s project was to shore up the boundaries between art forms, to maintain, in the battle against kitsch, the progress and integrity of each.16 Fried railed against ‘theatricality’ in the plastic arts, defending against the dissolution of works of art into what were, for him, mere occasions for the spectator’s response – lamenting that ‘experience alone is what matters’.17 Their critical pronouncements have polarized views on this subject, and their ideas about autonomous art have been seen by some as potentially authoritarian.18 The hey-day, or some might argue the swan-song, of the ascendency of late-modernist criticism was the 1960s. Those artists involved with conceptual art, Fluxus, and Arte Povera, dissatisfied with the aesthetic of the white cube, rejected the idea of autonomous art, which was associated with art’s commodification. Duchamp’s world of found and banal objects, as well as the events and proto-happenings of Futurism and Dadaism, impermanent installations and action-oriented events, marked the rise of temporal and non-traditional modes of art practice that turned increasingly towards social issues. They also instigated a range of criticism and commentary associated with political activism. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, multimedia installations have increasingly changed the relationship of the viewing subject with the object. A hierarchy is emerging in which the experience of the viewing subject is pre-eminent, leaving in abeyance, or even obsolescence, the difficulties posed by autonomous art and the differentiated experiences that may be prompted by it. Emphasis on the visitor’s experience augments the importance of the curatorial project of display, as opposed to training attention towards objects on display. The ‘white cube project’, Claire Bishop argues, has been ‘reconceptualized’. She suggests that the ‘studio or the experimental “laboratory”’ have become ‘paradigmatic of a visible tendency among European art venues’.19 Artists, curators, gallerists, critics, and museum curators are enthusiastic and active collaborators in this process. Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman are two of the artists whose works have been used and co-opted as precedents for current art and curatorial practices involved with reconfiguring the art of experience.

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The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as I said, even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. The problem lies in the word ‘understanding’ and its many levels which cannot be restricted to rational analysis. Imagination, inspiration, and longing all lead people to sense that these other levels also play a part in understanding.20

In the performance, Beuys was himself on display in the window of the gallery cradling a dead hare, mumbling explanations of the drawings that lined the walls. He had smeared honey and gold leaf over his head. Beuys created highly aestheticized objects and symbols of personal significance, designing specific situations for their display and, on occasion, his ‘performance’ of their display. Despite his rhetoric extolling the creativity of each and every person, Beuys operated resolutely as an artist. The glass window in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare formed a firm barrier between spectator and artist.21 He was interested in haphazard and chance encounters between the artist and viewer, and the participation they encouraged and occasioned. Beuys’s work may have blurred the boundaries between art, performance, and everyday life, but it did not merge them. The artist and spectator were not [con]fused, and Beuys did not try to elicit a particular response or experience. By contrast, the spectators’ experience became the overriding curatorial concern in the Bruce Nauman show at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1998.22 Through specific tactics of display, the spectator became a plaything of the exhibition. The viewer was surrounded by vast video projections, bombarded by noise, confronted by images of him- or herself on television screens, and enclosed within architectural spaces. This produced the cumulative effect of eradicating distance and entrapping the viewer within a spectacular simulation. The exhibition was set up to hector and bait the spectator, for whom little choice remained other than to endure the excesses of experience, and to experience the end of the illusion of the autonomy of art.

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Beuys explored art’s potential to transform the lives of spectators by making them question rational knowledge and analysis at its limits. Discussing the performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), in the Galerie Alfred Schmela, D¨usseldorf, Beuys explained:

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The continued critical effectiveness of Nauman’s work is dependent upon the preservation of the tension between experiences of ‘life’ and the self-reflexivity of art. If this tension is eschewed, the work is skewed and reduced to an experience (as it was in the Hayward show) of ‘aesthetic harassment’ – a phrase I borrow from Jean Baudrillard.23 Nauman’s work functioned in this exhibition by assimilating the identity of the object to the spectator’s own reality and identity, to the point of vertigo. These two examples show how artworks can be interpreted and assimilated to immediate trends and current curatorial demands. To note the emphasis upon the viewer’s subjective experience in the reception of Beuys and the display of Nauman’s works is to point to the changing meanings and values attributed to them. The locus of meaning has shifted from the tensions between art and viewer and between object and subject. In this move, experience is naturalized and ideology veiled. I am inclined to agree with Martin Jay that If the subjective is pushed to the extreme, it can allow the inappropriate slippage that turns anything into an aesthetic experience, no matter what its precipitating object might be . . . [T]he indiscriminate aestheticization of morally or politically fraught phenomena can also have disastrous consequences, as Walter Benjamin famously warned.24

We may ask whether contrivances that stress the subjective collude with the ontological shift in the museum and art gallery from education to entertainment – and from the spectator to something more akin to a consumer who ‘buys’ experiences.25 This brings us back again to question the ways in which experience is presently packaged.

Curating Experience Art institutions such as the Tate galleries, argues Donald Preziosi, rely on the paradigm set by the Great Exhibition of the Arts and Manufacturers at the Crystal Palace in 1851.26 The Great Exhibition succeeded ideologically, Preziosi maintains, because it was based upon nineteenth-century positivist historicism. It set the standard for museum display practice, and inserted itself into the mainstream of a commodified cultural industry. ‘Tate Modern’, he argues, is ‘organised 226

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by tendencies – tendencies toward abstraction, toward the body, toward costing a fortune’ – and, in this respect, is a model.27 Moreover, if we take Preziosi’s logic a step further, the shop display of the twentiethcentury modernist museum is no longer sufficient. Not only are the objects on show commodified, but so is the experience of art itself. An example of this development is the notion of the ‘themed exhibition’, such as Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project (2003) or Carsten H¨oller’s Test Site (2006–7), both of which were exhibited at Tate Modern. The Weather Project installation filled the Turbine Hall. Eliasson used humidifiers to generate a fine mist of sugar and water. A semicircular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps radiated single-frequency yellow light. The ceiling of the hall was covered with a huge mirror, in which visitors could see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light. Many visitors responded by lying on their backs and waving their hands and legs. Open for six months, the work reportedly attracted two million visitors.28 Chris Smith (Labour minister of culture, 1997–2001) claimed that the Weather Project forged a community by ‘helping to make a case for openness, for inclusion, for welcoming all comers’.29 The immanent ‘togetherness’ of community, celebrated by Smith, is not intrinsically democratic. He confuses inclusion with collectivity in the political rhetoric of community. In his view, the work of the work of art is not to occasion aesthetic experience, but to promote collective experience. In this argument, visitors are no longer spectators, but agents of a collective practice engaged in consumption. While Eliasson’s work solicited a rapturous response from visitors, H¨oller built an environment in which they could partake of an experience and become quite literally players in it. For Test Site, giant slides were installed in the Turbine Hall. Visitors sat on a cushion and hurtled down to emerge at the other end a few instants later. The artist suggested: ‘It’s a very odd thing with a slide; it’s quite an efficient way to go from place to place, but it is also like a barely controlled fall. It’s a very specific kind of madness to go down one.’30 In this case, the participant becomes a receptacle for sensation. Experience is reduced to little more than the ‘madness’ of ‘momentary excitation’.31 The constructive moment that allows experience to transcend mere stimulation is cut short, suppressing, if not obliterating, the role of memory and past experience in the present. This aspect of

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the work evokes a concern enunciated by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, who has suggested that we now live in a world in which sensation has replaced cognition, process has replaced content, and movement has replaced thought. The effects of the ‘post-modernization’ of museums, as I have argued elsewhere, favour the visitors’ experience over understanding.32 Nicholas Serota’s ideas and practice in Tate Modern have been seminal in the institutionalization of the dichotomy between experience and knowledge, between sensation and reflection. In Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Modern Art (1996), Serota provided an account of the history of the modern art museum, and indicated a future programme for what was then to be called Bankside.33 His overarching concern was with the experiential potential of the museum. Serota mobilized as antithetical propositions ‘experience’ and ‘interpretation’, which he suggested encapsulate the particular difficulties posed for art curators. What might the opposition between ‘experience’ and ‘interpretation’ signify in Serota’s title? For him, ‘interpretation’ equals historical categorization: the museum or gallery as history book. Paul Virilio has argued that Francis Fukuyama is right: ‘it is the end of history and the start of another history, that of events, of the “live”’.34 The ‘live’, for Serota, is ‘experience’, which he contrasts with ‘history’, to suggest an emotional investment on the part of the spectator. The issue, then, is the tenability or otherwise of this opposition, as well as its significance: hence the ‘dilemma’ for Serota. But perhaps it is a fake dilemma. Can experience remain outside of interpretation, and vice versa? Something extremely familiar is happening here: the separation of experience from interpretation reverses the age-old separation of thought from feeling, of sense from sensibility. Surely experience, in all its guises, prompts learning and an encounter with something new? Are not memory, recollection, and history entailed in all encounters with and the experience of art? Serota concluded his lecture as follows: In the new museum, each of us, curators and visitors alike, will have to become more willing to chart our own paths, redrawing the map of modern art, rather than following a single path laid down by a curator. We have come a long way from Eastlake’s chronological hang by school, but the educational and aesthetic purpose is no less significant . . . but in

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We pass hurriedly from the inclusive ‘curators and visitors alike’ to the collective pronoun ‘our’. The collectivity marked by that ‘our’ is that of the museum professional. This is not necessarily a cause for resentment; rather, it is the disingenuousness of this shift that is vexing. What Serota desired was seemingly an art freed from the burden of history (interpretation), a world in which the unidentified visitor is left alone to experience a ‘climatic zone’ that has been created by a curator. We meet again the universal, abstract spectator, posited as an idealized private self, but now expected to invent his or her own path, albeit through a highly formalized ‘climatic zone’. This provides a frame for experience, a supplement to the work staged, in such a way that the narrator’s voice is suppressed. Serota appears to advocate a go-asyou-please version of post-modernism, which jettisons history and has the effect of conjuring Roland Barthes’s ‘dead author’ to return as a ghost, a shadowy curator’s presence, haunting but not quite claiming the space.36 The presence of the curator could hardly be more pronounced than in the fourth Tate Trienniale, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud (2009). His writing on ‘relational aesthetics’ provides the theoretical rationale for much current art practice.37 Art, for Bourriaud, is a ‘hypertext’, the artist is a ‘nomad’, and the spectator is enjoined to follow a highly choreographed passage, ‘stressing’, as Bourriaud puts it, ‘the experience of wandering in time, space and mediums’.38 The works of artists such as Beuys and Nauman are called upon as guides for the random encounters, audience participation, and interactive installations that he celebrates in the exhibitions he curates. Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ has been notably criticized by Claire Bishop in the art journal October. She identifies a paradox in his writing: a tendency to elevate the intentions of the artist while diminishing the prospects of the spectators’ interpretation. Bishop

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my view we still need a curator to stimulate readings of the collection and to establish those ‘climatic zones’ which can enrich our appreciation and understanding of the art of this century. Our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than finding themselves standing on the conveyor belt of history.35

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suggests that Bourriaud confuses interpretations of art with its objects: ‘Rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.’39 I would argue additionally that, in Bourriaud’s work, the distinctions between curator, artist, and viewer are being eroded in the name of accessible experience. The 1990s was the decade of the meteoric rise of the celebrity curator whose newfound institutional power may well have replaced that of the critic and, through the display devices of exhibitions, diminished that of the artist, leaving the visitor alone in possession of an experience. Examination of these examples reveals a pattern in which ‘experience’ has, in the current artworld, become associated with authenticity, truth, egalitarianism, democracy, feeling, subjectivity, and sensibility. These terms work in binary opposition to the negative values of inauthenticity, lies, iniquity, authoritarianism, objectivity, understanding, and sense. Through this chain of associations, ‘experience’ is understood as individual, democratic, and egalitarian, in contrast to the presumed authority of knowledge, which in itself is undemocratic and inaccessible. ‘Experience’ is privileged over knowledge, in which contemplation is assumed to be passive and disengaged. Seen as an end in itself, experience is deployed as the reverse of anything that jeopardizes immediacy, naturalness, or inspiration, betraying a yearning for a lost world of integrated subjects.

Reclaiming Experience Returning to the question with which I began this chapter – Experience in the service of what end? – the display practices I have discussed may be said, following Bishop, to mirror the ‘experience’ model of economy.40 In The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (1999), Pine and Gilmore argue that the service economy is being replaced by the ‘experience economy’. This, they explain, is a ‘marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experiences to engage the participant in a personal way’.41 Following Pine and Gilmore, J.R. Rossman maintains: ‘Learning techniques for producing . . . experiences is essential for community arts professionals.’42 With recourse to Jay, I suggest that the distinguishing mark of art, and the one that separates it from 230

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entertainment, has been that the latter sells commodified experiences, whereas the former does not.43 The commodification of experience is one of the most prevalent tendencies of our age, and participatory art forms risk being absorbed into this tendency. The notion of experience as a commodity for sale is precisely the opposite of what Walter Benjamin argued an experience should be – namely, something that can never be fully possessed by its owner. What is lost in the commodification of experience in the service industry is the elusive relationship between perception as an active engagement and as a mere conduit for stimuli. Against this prevailing modality of experience, La Chambre Claire by Susan Trangmar prompts a perambulation thorough the vicissitudes of experience, the remembrance of which turns into a narrative. Rather than focusing on the production of immediate sensation, it mediates between subject and object, memory and experience. The contemplative gathering of memory precipitated by La Chambre Claire provides a retrospective glimpse of possible mediation, if not reconciliation, between subject and object, experience and knowledge. The work resonates with Benjamin’s distinction between two modes of experience: Erlebnis – ‘lived experience’ – which is personal and incommunicable, and Erfahrung, which links experience to memory, and is more public and transmissible in character.44 It is the latter that Benjamin wished to revive against the dangers he identified as the perils of the aestheticization of everyday life. In my view, La Chambre Claire creates an experience of the ‘aesthetic otherwise’.45 It evokes experience as something that is gathered through the duration of memory and time, rather than the discrete ‘shock’ of experience as witnessed in the work of Eliasson and H¨oller. It is resistant to ‘immediacy’, or to giving the viewer an ‘expression’ of self. Instead, La Chambre Claire offers the spectator space and time for thought and active criticality as its mode of engagement. It functions in the following way: The viewer enters a secluded darkened room, an aperture, a camera obscura. At that very moment she is touched by the light emanating from the outline edge of a blinded window. At the blink of an eye, a green blind becomes visible. Three disturbing disruptions: one from light to dark, another from dark to light, and another again from light to dark. Interior light flickers across the window. At the speed of an instant it comes and goes. La Chambre

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Claire acts in memory. No physical record of it exists or can exist. In a very literal sense it abides in memory alone. The work remains as an immaterial shadow of itself, cut off from the present of perception as a memory of an experience. The event gives rise to narrative. Counterpoints to the confusion of memories are the narratives that we invent for them. Through recollection La Chambre Claire acquires a faint identity. Eight low-voltage halogen lights are set into the four corners of the room, hidden behind pelmets. Light fills the room and disappears again and again, repeatedly, seemingly at random. Flickering and uncertain, light outside is co-present with light inside. Light is thus apportioned. Illuminated momentarily are ordered bookcases, lined from floor to ceiling with catalogue upon catalogue of Sotheby’s and Christie’s Annual Reports from 1969 to 1996 and sales records from 1995 to 1996.46 The unexpected changes in the art world are noted and archived. An archive is a practice that defines and arranges texts in patterns of significance. It regulates, preserves, and transmits. The uniformity of the arrangement presages identity. This particular archive is the collection of an art dealer. Its value is instrumental, a pragmatic tool of his trade. It provides a linear history of the circulation of those commodities. La Chambre Claire irradiates the archive. It highlights and hides the institutional figures (the artist, the gallery, and the dealer) that produce the commodities of the art market. It illuminates the dialectical tension between appearance and disappearance, disorder and order. It sparks a vision of the invisible as a visible sign of invisibility: the invisible play of absence and presence, the infinite play of darkness and light, of a coming in and out of sight. In this regard, it is an anachronistic affront to familiarity and longing. It is a defence against quotidian order. Its condition of absolute invisibility also leaves the trace of a monumental disappearance demanding reconstitution. Memory embraces remembrance, recollection, and memorialization. La Chambre Claire points to the unrealizable recovery of the absent past, and engages with a disappearing condition while at the same time inviting us to acknowledge or to be touched by it, and to be ready for loss. Trangmar notes: ‘The work springs from interiority that does feel the burden of loss which cannot be overridden or denied. The originary loss has something melancholic about it as fact, which I feel the work

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acknowledges; whilst I hope it does not itself perpetuate a condition of melancholy.’47 Melancholy is a desperate holding on to the lost object through confrontation with its dissolution. La Chambre Claire is prepared for the destructive force of disappearance and loss. The work draws a limit – the impossibility of recapturing experience which is unknowable, unknown to it, and finite. The difficulty of remembering is matched by the impossibility of knowing. Nothing can document or record La Chambre Claire save that which lingers on in memory. Only through the ultimate sacrifice of its own oblivion is it possible to begin to comprehend the work that experience inevitably fails to know. La Chambre Claire enunciates an experience somewhere between involvement and separation, identification and detachment. Mediating between subject and object, it transmits the memory of an experience and an experience of the limits of both knowledge and experience. It exposes the mixed nature of experience as both subject of and subject to. In consequence, the boundaries between subject and object are not effaced, but are experienced as permeable. While acknowledging that ‘experience’ is at once reified and in danger, a work such as La Chambre Claire indicates ways in which an experience of art might stand as a protest against what Martin Jay has identified as the commodification of both art and experience.48 The subtle vacillations of Trangmar’s work open us to an experience of the abyss between aesthetic judgement and subjectivity in which content re-emerges, paradoxically, as a laboriously constructed nothingness. At its furthest point, La Chambre Claire makes visible its original project and brings the untransmissible to the transmissible. It is not reducible to the terms circumscribed by experience or knowledge, subject or object. It privileges neither optical contemplation nor interactivity, but invokes and involves both. It provides a site of struggle between contesting impulses which resists the binary dualism between active and passive. In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Ranci`ere has argued that ‘it is necessary to place the question of the spectator at the heart of the discussion of the relations between art and politics’.49 Throughout much of the book, Ranci`ere feminizes the spectator, thus emphasizing the assumptions of passivity historically associated with female gender roles. A spectator, he points out, is deemed to be ‘bad’. First, because

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viewing is opposed to knowing, the spectator is assumed to be ignorant. Secondly, the spectator is passive: ‘To be a spectator is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act.’50 These assumptions suggest that disinterested viewing is untenable because we are not involved enough. What is enough? Is it not enough for someone to visit an art show, or must he or she become part of the exhibition, enrolled, and stitched into the fabric of its meaning? An ‘emancipated spectator’, in Ranci`ere’s formulation, is not someone who has been goaded into having an experience, but is ‘already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story’.51 The viewer is assumed to be a subject capable of independent thought. Knowledge is intimately connected with experience. My argument is that the spectator’s experience of La Chambre Claire is more than a subjective experience: it is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness to circumvent the rigid categories of experience and knowledge. As a result, the spectator is respected as a knowing and active subject, involved in narrating and translating. Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and performing and the structure of the relationship between knowledge and experience. In his conclusion Jay suggests that experience ‘involves an openness to the world . . . a willingness to open the seemingly integrated and selfcontained subject to the outside, thus allowing the most perilous, but potentially rewarding journey to begin’.52 Something worthy of the name ‘experience’ cannot leave us where we began. In this chapter I have argued that the current fixation on experience in exhibition display erodes differences between ‘art’ and ‘life’, between the subject of experience and its objects. The subject is presumed to receive an experience, as if it is identical with an already assumed identity. In contrast to this vision of art and the artworld, I have identified La Chambre Claire as a work that can lead us to reclaim the complexity and ambiguity of ‘experience’. It expresses a poetic imagination that seeks out the gap between sense perception, empirical data, and the intuitions or categories of the intellect. This intermediary world is the location of a productive struggle: a place in which neither ‘binary dualisms nor reductive monism’ rule out the experiment that is the experience of living.53

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I am indebted to Stella Santacatterina for encouragement and positive criticism when I most needed it. Sincere thanks to Anthony Gardner for his attention to detail and lively provocations. I am indebted to Jenny Walden for her more than generous input, lucidity, and incisive comments, which have helped me clarify some of the most troublesome aspects of this essay. Finally, thanks to Kathryn Brown for organizing the session at the Association of Art Historians Conference, 2011, where I presented a version of this paper. Her unwavering commitment as editor of this anthology has helped me hone this essay. Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd, eds, Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museum Theatre and Live Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). Jackson and Kidd, Performing Heritage, p. 2. www.notcot.com/.../07/high-arctic-at-the-national-ma.php. (accessed 9 May, 2012) Irida Ntalla ‘Interactivity and Audience Experience in the Modern Museum: Discussing Findings from [a] Case Study on the “High Arctic” Immersive Installation, National Maritime Museum, London’. Available at www.dreamconference.dk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Ntalla.pdf, p. 2. (accessed 18 July, 2012) Ibid., p. 9. The work was made for Light, an exhibition curated by Joan Key and Paul Herber-Percy at the Richard Salmon Gallery, London, 1997. Jacques Ranci`ere, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009). Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 13. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingston and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 732; Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘In Memory of Eichendorff’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 2 vols, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–2), vol. 1, p. 55; Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 2.

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Notes

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Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of History, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1999), p. 13. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations’, in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 406. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), reprinted in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 158. For a nuanced and sympathetic account of Greenberg’s identity as a critic, see Thierry De Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); for a more ambivalent discussion of his art criticism, see Juliet Steyn, The Jew: Assumptions of Identity (London: Cassel, 1998). Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 51–79, at p. 51. Joseph Beuys, ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’, in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, exhibition catalogue, trans. Caroline Tisdall (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), p. 105. In one account of the action the gallery was closed to the public, and Beuys’s action was witnessed only by the photographer Ute Klophus and a television crew. See Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, trans. David Britt (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 135. Bruce Nauman, Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, 16 July–6 September 1998. The exhibition was initiated by the Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris). The version of Bruce Nauman presented in the Hayward was designed to show its relevance for British art – that is to say, to create a precedent and legitimating strategy for young British art. For example, the installation Art Make-Up (1967–8), one of the earliest works on show, is described by Greg Hilty, in the gallery guide as, ‘closely in tune with the art of today in its ritualistic focus on self-identity’. Nicholas Zurbrugg, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact (London: Sage, 1997), p. 11. Jay, Songs of Experience, pp. 405–6. Ibid., 407. Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 114. Ibid., pp. 24–5. Cynthia Zarin, ‘Seeing Things’, New Yorker, 13 November 2006. Available at www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/13/061113fa-fact-zarin (accessed 14 July, 2012)

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Chris Smith, ‘The Political Impact’, in Martin Gayford, The Tate Modern: The First Five Years (London: Tate Publications, 2005), p. 19. Randy Kennedy, ‘Is It Art, Science or a Test of People?’, The New York Times, 25 October 2011. Available at www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/ arts/design/carsten-holler-exhibition-at-the-new-museum.html (accessed 17 June, 2012) Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 406. Juliet Steyn, ‘The Museums’ Future’, Futures 38: 5 (2006), pp. 606–18. Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Modern Art, Neurath Memorial Lecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996). Paul Virilio, ‘Un monde surexpos´e’, in Franc¸oise Docquiert, Franc¸ois Piron, and Paul Virilio, Image et Politique: Actes du colloque des rencontres internationales de la photographie (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), p. 19 (my translation). Serota, Experience or Interpretation, p. 55. Roland Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978). Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les Presses du r´eel, 2009). Bourriaud, ‘Introduction’, in Altermodern, Tate Britain Gallery Guide, February 2009. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, p. 52. Ibid. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmour, The Experience Economy: Work Is a Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), p. 11. J.R. Rossman, ‘Programming Approaches’, in G. Carpenter and D. Blandy, eds, Arts and Cultural Programming: A Leisure Perspective (Champaign: Human Kinetics Europe, 2008), pp. 23–37, at p. 24. Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 407. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Story Teller’, is one example of his constant ruminations on ‘experience’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimilco, 1999), pp. 83–107. For a detailed discussion of La Chambre Claire and its interface with ideas developed by Walter Benjamin, see Juliet Steyn, ‘Art: Futures of the Past’, Futures 39: 10 (2007), pp. 1, 168–77. The archive is a part of Richard Salmon’s book collection which is a significant document of twentieth-century art. Susan Trangmar, from an unpublished interview with the artist, 10 August 1999. Her perspicacious remarks have been invaluable for the formulation of this text.

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Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 407. Ranci`ere, Emancipated Spectator, p. 2. Ibid. Ibid., p. 17. Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 408. Ibid., p. 404.

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11

Curating Interactivity: Models, Motivations, and New Institutionalism Margriet Schavemaker

In recent years, curators, educators, and designers have been faced with questions about the potential and limitations of practices designed to encourage audience participation. A rapidly growing body of educational projects (often involving new media such as interactive touchscreens in gallery spaces, multimedia tours on mobile devices, and social media) is being developed by art institutions around the world to make exhibitions more interactive, and to stimulate dialogue with museum visitors. Critical discussion and reflection on such projects among curators and educational and media staff is overwhelming.1 The key question fuelling this discourse is: How do these practices enhance and innovate audience participation? Or, as Nina Simon formulates it in The Participatory Museum: ‘[W]hich tool or technique will produce the desired participatory experience?’2 Parallel to efforts in ‘interactive curating’, modern and contemporary art museums and institutions have increasingly committed themselves to working on lines of educational and public programming to which a new dialogue with the audience is fundamental (for example, performance art, lectures, debates, screenings, and conferences). The 239

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major difference between conventional museum education and new styles of public programming is that the latter does not just complement a museum’s collection, but is in fact central to the agenda of the relevant institution, often supported by its own departments, curators, budgets, and content. Such public programmes are not intended simply to contextualize or explain art objects, but are artworks or exhibitions in themselves, often with no ties at all to the exhibitions in the museum. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson have described this trend as a ‘curatorialisation of education’.3 A self-critical discourse on this type of programming is largely lacking in museum studies. Rephrasing Nina Simon’s question, I think it is timely to ask: Which tool or technique will produce the desired public experience? In an initial foray to fill this gap, this chapter takes a closer look at curatorial strategies employed in public programming in modern and contemporary art museums. Working from my own experiences as designer and (co-)curator of such programmes at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, I will concentrate on various ways in which interactivity and audience participation are framed in four curatorial models. I will then examine some of the primary motivations that are driving this trend and shaping its future.

Four Curatorial Models In contrast to visual art exhibitions, public programmes fail in the absence of an audience. For this reason, the basic curatorial model of the public programme seems to be that of the performing arts. However, if we take a closer look at the type of events and public programmes being organized by major museums, festivals, biennales, and art fairs, other models come to the fore. One particularly widespread model is that of the academic conference. Much public programming consists in straightforward lectures and debates, often resulting in the publication of extensive readers and an archive of presented talks. Examples of this form of programming include the ‘caucuses’ organized by the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) in the context of the project Be(com)ing Dutch (2008–9) and the project The Former West (2008–14), organized by BAK (Basis voor aktuele kunst), Utrecht in collaboration with partner institutions.4 Here, curators take on important roles as both speakers and authors. They are presented as arbiters of taste in art and 240

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critical thinking, and often work from a specific political ideology. Artists are invited as speakers alongside philosophers and political thinkers. The audience has the opportunity to participate in the final discussion, and to access the presented discourse (in video and writing) after the event. The museum’s auditorium space is commonly used as the locus for this ‘conference model’.5 This means that the audience is seated in the dark, separated from the rest of the museum, listening to speakers on a podium. Recognizing that this hierarchy is a bar to interactivity, some institutions deploy spectacular design and architecture to shake up this conventional setting while nevertheless retaining the element of performance. Noteworthy examples of this trend include the annually commissioned Summer Pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery (London), an innovative architectural space that becomes home to a series of talks and events (Fig. 11.1), and the proposed, but unrealized inflatable addition to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro, the latter was to provide a temporary venue for public programmes during the busy months of May and October in the core atrium of the museum. These specially designed venues affirm what Sally Tallant, head of programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, sees as a key aspect of this new type of programming – namely, its creative extension beyond education: ‘the participant[s] in, or audience of, curatorial projects witness them, not as a site of learning but rather as a spectacle’.6 In contrast to the conference model, other public programmes seek to initiate dialogue with the public by stimulating greater active input from, and exchange between, participants. The BMW Guggenheim Lab, for example, is a mobile architectural framework that hosts a programme designed for the local community it is temporarily visiting. It offers a flexible space for debate around a central theme of the future of the relevant city, and seeks to engage with the local community for the purpose of inspiring ‘innovative ideas for urban life’.7 This curatorial praxis could be defined as the ‘community model’, as it encourages dialogue with members of the local environment and aims to foster learning through discussion. In this case, the curator is less important as an arbiter of taste, and instead takes on the roles of facilitator, moderator, and producer. The Lab’s open, multifunctional space, positioned on the periphery of the urban realm, creates an informal and

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Figure 11.1 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2012.

low-key atmosphere. In the absence of written proceedings, results of the research remain local and transitory, like the space itself.8 The third curatorial model that has been developed to bring the audience out of the museum auditorium consists in events of the type developed by the Stedelijk Museum in its Do It! series. These events take place in the evening and are devoted to art that has a temporary, performative, or participatory character – in other words, art forms that are well served by presentation in a limited amount of time to an audience that has come especially for the occasion. Each event is structured around a particular theme: for example, Taste It! was devoted to food design (Fig. 11.2); Smell It! focused on olfactory art; two Hear It! evenings involved sound art from past and present; Play It! was dedicated to artistic games; and Augment It! explored the possibilities of augmented reality experienced through the use of smart-phones (Fig. 11.3). The evenings involve an mixture of performances, interactive installations (sometimes from the Stedelijk’s permanent collection), and discussion (lectures, debates, seminars). Each takes place throughout the museum’s entire premises, or those of collaborating institutions, and aims to provoke critical reflection on the individual themes, together with direct experience of the works that are installed for the event and the spaces in which they are presented. 242

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This combination offers the audience a chance to participate in a mini ‘festival’ complete with a dedicated programme, timetable, and site map. In this respect, the Do It! events can be best understood as examples of what I would like to call the ‘festival model’. For transitory artworks, such as performances and new media installations, this is an apt model, as it facilitates the display of specialist and minority art forms that often suffer from ‘curatorial invisibility’, as Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook point out.9 Curators are important in this model because they present artistic trends to the audience and bridge a gap between education and direct experience of the artwork. They may also collaborate with guest curators who are specialized in particular artistic fields. The audience is typically free to plan its own route and, depending on the interactive nature of the presented art forms, to participate in the presented works (by eating, smelling, or gaming). Because of the temporary character of the events and absence of post-event documentation, the evenings generate a strong sense of participation in a unique event. The final curatorial model I want to mention is one in which participation and education are given a less transient character, and may be described as an ‘exhibition model’. An example is Maria Hlavajova’s

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Figure 11.2 Taste it! Stedelijk Museuem, Amsterdam. Photo Ernst van Deursen, 2010.

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Figure 11.3 Augment It! Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Photo Ernst van Deursen, 2012.

Roma Pavilion, which formed part of the Venice Biennale (2011), in which lectures about the Roma (from, for example, Salman Rushdie) and videos of Roma contributors were shown on screens hanging in the overarching artwork constructed by Dutch artist Aernout Mik (Fig. 11.4). I refer to this as the ‘exhibition model’ because the public programme is fused with the artwork itself: it therefore functions as part of an exhibition that consists in interactive dialogue with a public, and that welcomes a future audience.10 Although this exhibition model integrates education and display, it is seldom successfully deployed in such a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk-like’ way. A complementary trend consists in a more minimalist version of the ‘exhibition model’, in which curators are content to move out of the auditorium and to dedicate gallery spaces to performances, screenings, and seminars. When there is no programme, these spaces, which are part of the exhibition route, remain empty – a gap in the display forum that can be read as a silent ode to the importance of this kind of public programming. To the audience that passes through such spaces at a time when there is no performance, screening, or other presentation, the empty spaces seem to say one thing: transient art, events, and critical reflection are a crucial part of the exhibition environment. The opening 244

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of the Tate Tanks in London in the same year is closely tied to this trend. The imposing new wing of Tate Modern is dedicated to what is referred to as ‘art in action’. The huge spaces for performance art and the overwhelming auditorium are works of art in themselves. One almost wonders whether they really have need of the ephemeral art and events that they are intended to host. My aim in providing a brief overview of contrasting curatorial models in current forms of public programming is to highlight the degree to which museum professionals focus on the importance of audience participation, and to evaluate the result of these efforts. The form and degree of interactivity appears to differ in the various cases: it is crucial in the community model, whereas it is reduced to a reworking of the displayed materials in the conference model. In the festival model, participation is triggered by the interactive art and performances that are presented, whereas the exhibition model fuses art, space and (critical) interactivity, with the risk of making the latter superfluous.

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Figure 11.4 Aernout Mik, Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion, 2011.

Motivations (Or, Why and For Whom?) As audience participation is a significant aspect of these new types of museum programming, the question arises of the motivations that 245

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prompt this development. For the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the organizing of this type of programming arose partly from an attempt to counter problems concerning its invisibility in the city (due to housing complications arising from its lengthy period of renovation and the construction of an additional wing) and its strategies for retaining an audience.11 But the popularity of the Stedelijk’s public programme also showed the extent to which the museum world had changed since the 1990s. Art institutions are no longer viewed by audiences as places that simply display high quality art. Instead, they are expected to offer opportunities for experimentation and critical reflection. As Miwon Kwon describes it, the museum has become a ‘discursive space’.12 One might reasonably ask, however, for whom the museum has become such a space. It is important to note that ‘public’ programmes also serve as ‘professional’ programmes that attract colleagues (senior and junior, practice-based and academic) from all kinds of related areas, and that such professionals often outnumber members of a more general public.13 I realize this idea is not one that museums are eager to acknowledge or promote, as it sounds exclusive and uninviting to a lay audience. The fact that a substantial part of the audience that attends public programmes consists of art professionals affects the way in which these events are organized and framed, not to mention the motivations for holding them in the first place.14 However, in the critical literature thus far produced on the discursive turn in museums, this aspect of public programmes has not been seriously studied. Instead, priority is given to ways in which museums have embraced a self-critical discourse. The terms ‘New Institutionalism’ and ‘Critical Institutionalism’ are often used to describe this shift in art institutions.15 Causes for the opening up of the museum to these self-critical discourses are found in various areas. For Miwon Kwon, this development is related to changes in artistic production: rather than producing aesthetic objects that can simply be shown by the museum, many artists have become producers of ‘critical-artistic services’ – a phenomenon that flourishes through a symbiotic relationship with the art institutions that host, facilitate, and co-produce these particular artistic ‘services’.16 Other critics argue that the new ways in which museums have opened themselves up to discursive practices derive from political pressure. On the one hand, the museum is understood as part of a

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wider economy (often subject to reduced funding by state or municipal governments, it must become a commercial enterprise that markets art and the experience of art to an audience that is willing to pay for it). On the other hand, it serves as a place in which people can contest and counteract this economic and social reality. Chantal Mouffe’s response to this line of thought is to conceive of the museum as a place for ‘agonistic pluralism’.17 She argues that society has reached a state in which people will always disagree, and that sharing differences is the most constructive way forward. The museum is the place, par excellence, in which to voice opinions with respect to personal and political differences, as it is an environment both within and detached from society. For Irit Rogoff, ‘New Institutionalism’ has another side: it hovers between art and academia, and thereby changes both. Rogoff means by this that the educational turn in the artworld provides art schools and academia with a creative space in which to play and interact: no stringent rules about curricula or teaching methods hold sway here. For the educational field, the art institution is a free zone in which learning can happen in a variety of non-standard ways. Conversely, from the perspective of the artworld, Rogoff argues that the turn to education as an operating model can lift institutions out of whitecube exile: alliances with academia can be experienced by curators and artists as a re-invigoration of ‘the spaces of display as sites of genuine transformation’.18 The majority of critical discourses around New Institutionalism discuss only in very general terms the public for whom and with whom these critical artistic, political, and educational presentations are taking place. Adopting the framework of Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (2002), one might argue that a variety of audiences participate in the museum: a regular audience that is dominant and constructed by institutional and social powers, and a counter-audience that seeks to subvert and transform these powers.19 Yet this might lead to the overly simplistic conclusion that interactive, critical public programmes, and performances, are meant for ‘counter-audiences’, whereas conventional programmes are curated for a regular, more dominant audience. Rejecting this binary model, Simon Sheikh argues that we should instead talk about a ‘post-public’ situation that is more diffuse than

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an exchange between two opposing groups.20 Even Warner himself argues that the so-called counterpublics establish their own sets of rules and power structures as well – the group shares ‘an imaginary address, a specific discourse and/or location . . . involving circularity and reflexivity’.21 This means that counter-audiences can easily become dominant. A situation such as this may be the case in many of the new models of interactive curating. If we interpret the audiences of such programmes as ‘counter-audiences’, then they appear to be talking to, and interacting with, themselves – the professionals – affirming their own position, and making it hard to be open to an agonistic dialogue with others. We may concur with Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s argument that there is a conflict between audience expectations and expectations of audiences: ‘the more open the institution becomes, the more it focuses on audience participation and on non-traditional and non-hierarchical exhibition concepts, the more difficult it becomes to access for an audience that seeks identification and visual pleasure’.22 To put this point more strongly: it appears that art institutions have opened up, but largely to themselves. So what can be done about that? Trying to find an answer to this question, I encountered a work by Bea Schlingelhoff from the series I’m too Christian for Art (2012), shown at Manifesta 9 at Genk (2012). We see a picture of a woman saying ‘Fuck the participant’ – a statement that has been added to the image in a hand-drawn text balloon. The depicted woman is the philosopher Simone Weil. On the one hand, Schlingelhoff shows her admiration for twentieth-century political engagement by revolutionary thinkers such as Weil. On the other, she makes the figure ‘say’ things that can be read as a questioning of critically engaged art and current curatorial practices, both of which are informed by the ideology that art should stimulate an innovative and interactive dialogue with its audience. This doubly selfcritical attitude towards engagement (putting revolutionary women on a pedestal, but using them to show the impossibility of one of contemporary art’s core missions) may serve as a model for dealing with the complex relationships between interactive public programming and its audiences. With that in mind, I would like to end this chapter with a plea for a greater critical consciousness. Public programmes in museums would benefit from being more self-critical and more questioning of their

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underlying ideologies and institutional frameworks. We might call this a ‘new turn in New Institutionalism’ or, to use Simon Sheik’s phrase, an ‘expanded institutional critique’.23 The aim of such an exercise would be to assess in more critical fashion the aims and methods of interactive platforms and public programmes, and to acknowledge the role played by other motivations and power structures at work within art institutions that are shaping this trend. In his essay, Post-Propaganda, Dutch artist Jonas Staal addresses the need for such a new, self-critical attitude.24 Taking his lead from (among others) the highly critical public programmes of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and BAK in Utrecht, Staal describes the complicated entanglement of museums with politics and with their own institutional power. Sponsored by the state on the one hand, yet questioning of the political climate on the other, public programmes aim to open the artworld to innovative dialogues with a diverse public. At the same time, however, institutions use such programmes to affirm their own position within the artworld. I agree with Staal that this complexity needs to be addressed.25 Instead of idealistic beliefs in the surplus value of art and its institutions, Staal pleads for an accountable art (including its curatorial presentation and discursive framing) that, in its relation to politics and power, ‘shrugs off all forced clich´es regarding [its] critical potential . . . and that, with all the unavoidable risks and potential failure that comes with them[,] positions itself within this power’.26 It must be acknowledged that certain other writers in the field of New Institutional programming do not believe that such a step is necessary. In critic Jan Verwoert’s formulation, we have to keep ‘lying’ to the public.27 In using the word ‘lying’, Verwoert refers to several ideas. In the first place, the term is used to suggest the Enlightenment concept that is still used to defend art – namely, that art is good for you; it is supposed to make you a better human being. Verwoert seeks to unmask this idea as a lie that is designed to support the ongoing social relevance of art institutions, and calls it ‘the smokescreen that, until now, has guaranteed our economic survival over the centuries’.28 But there is also a second lie that is relevant for this chapter. Verwoert is aware of the fact that it is the critic of institutional power structures who in fact proves these structures to be of importance, because he or she generates the public belief that it

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is the institutional apparatus that is the most important power in the artworld.29 Verwoert’s argument contests the idea with which this chapter began – namely, that the artworld should know more about the audience it is addressing, and that this dialogue can and should be improved. In Verwoert’s view, this smells like commercial productplacement.30 In opposition to this market-style thinking, Verwoert embraces a situation in which cultural actors do not know their audience at all. The public remains anonymous, and this offers greater opportunities to open up meaningful dialogues and to reach wider communities. In contrast to this, what we are currently saying is a ‘lie’, because our words are used for the purpose of making art and its institutions more powerful in society.31 Although I do not agree with this cynical conclusion, it is a step towards the expanded institutional criticism for which I am searching. Verwoert understands the power structures that underpin the artworld, and exposes the way in which artists, critics, and curators are complicit with them. In contrast to Verwoert, however, I opt for an increasingly open critical discourse in which we can analyze and evaluate curatorial models and dare to share our failures as honestly as our successes. At a time when many governments are reducing levels of financial support to art institutions, an enhanced spirit of self-criticism among art institutions can offer opportunities for an increased sharing of interests and practices. Such exchange should be open not just to professionals, but to any other audience that desires to be actively involved. In other words: even if we think we need to keep lying we have to stop lying about it.

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See, for instance, the proceedings of the annual conference ‘Museums and the Web’, at www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.html (accessed 27 April, 2014) Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum, 2010, at www.participatorymus eum.org (accessed 27 April, 2014) Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds, Curating and the Educational Turn (London/Amsterdam: Open Editions/De Appel Arts Centre, 2010), p. 13.

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The Van Abbemuseum project ‘Be(com)ing Dutch’ is curated by Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher (see www.becomingdutch.com); and ‘Former West’ is curated by Maria Hlavajova and others (see www.formerwest.org) (accessed 27 April, 2014) See Mark Nash, ‘Auditorium: A Theatre for Learning’, in Shamita Sharmacharja, eds, A Manual For the 21st Century Art Institution (Cologne: Walther Konig, 2009), pp. 130–9. Sally Tallant, ‘Experiments in Integrated Programming’, Tate Papers 11 (2009), p. 3. See www.guggenheim.org/guggenheim-foundation/collaborations/bmwguggenheim (accessed 27 April, 2014) The fact that this model is not always embraced by locals became clear in the summer of 2012, when the Lab had to change locations in Berlin as left-wing extremists opposed its temporary settling in the Kreuzberg area, forcing the Lab to move to a building (!) in the dignified Prenzlauer Berg district. Information from www.smartplanet.com/blog/globalobserver/in-berlin-bmw-guggenheim-lab-moves-north/4801 (accessed 28 October, 2012) Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 216. The authors also point out that festivals have come to represent the rise of ‘the curator as author, the globetrotting arbiter of taste and culture, and the curator’s role has expanded to producer as well as selector’. Maria Hlavajova created the pavilion for the Roma in the Palazzo Zorzi, the office for UNESCO in Venice. This nomadic group is not normally represented at the Venice Biennale, an art context that is organized by pavilions dedicated to representatives of nation-states. The exhibition space dedicated to the transnational Roma people consisted of a construction by Dutch artist Aernout Mik that pierced the walls of the venue, and thus connected interior and exterior. The construction was inspired by Constant Nieuwenhuys’s Design for a Gypsy Camp (1956–8), and the following New Babylon (1956–8), in which the artist envisioned an architectural design for a nomadic camp for Roma families who had been driven out of the Italian city of Alba. The space in Venice was also inspired by a Roma court model, and offered a platform for lectures, debates, artists’ presentations, and screenings that gave evidence of the difficult position of the Roma community in contemporary society. For more information on this project, see www.callthewitness.org/ Main. (accessed 27 April, 2014)

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In total, the Stedelijk Museum’s main premises on the Museumplein in Amsterdam was closed for over eight years owing to the extensive renovations that needed to be made to the 115-year-old building and the construction of an additional wing. The museum opened its doors again on 23 September 2012. The museum’s public programme was initiated by the author and co-curated with Hendrik Folkerts, a curatorial assistant, and many guest-curators, from both within and outside the Stedelijk Museum team. For more information, see www.stedelijk.nl. Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity’, October 80 (Spring 1997), pp. 85–110. The various events often draw their own crowds (design events attract designers; theoretical debates on art theory attract artists and theorists; media art events attract creative industry professionals and new media students), but it would be interesting to examine how these audiences define themselves in the sense of their professional relation to the presented content. There is an analogy between this aspect of public programmes and the audience that is reached by artists working with new forms of audience participation. As Claire Bishop has made clear in her discussion of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cooking works, the participants are in most cases professional artworld insiders. This diminishes the ‘social’ effect of the work, but enhances critical appreciation by art professionals. As Bishop notes, ‘Tiravanija’s intervention is considered good because it permits networking among a group of art dealers and like-minded art lovers, and because it evokes the atmosphere of a late-night bar. Everyone has a common interest in art, and the result is art-world gossip, exhibition reviews, and flirtation.’ Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 51–79, at p. 67. See, for instance, Nina M¨ontmann, ed., Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations (London: Black Dog, 2006). Kwon, ‘One Place After Another’, p. 103. We can also think of the widespread development to facilitate artistic research. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’ (Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies, Reihe Politikwissenschaft, Political Science Series, 2000), p. 72. Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, in E-Flux Journal Reader (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2009), p. 165. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

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28 29 30 31

Simon Sheikh, ‘Publieken en postpublieken: De productie van het sociale’, Open 14 (2008), pp. 28–36. Quoted in Simon Sheikh, ‘The Trouble with Institutions, or, Art and Its Publics’, in M¨ontmann, Art and Its Institutions, pp. 142–9, at p. 146. Sven-Olov Wallenstein, ‘Institutional Desires’, in M¨ontmann, Art and Its Institutions, pp. 114–22, at p. 115. Sheikh, ‘The Trouble With Institutions’, in M¨ontmann, Art And Its Institutions, pp. 142–9. Jonas Staal, Post-Propaganda (Amsterdam: Fonds BKVB, 2009). Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 93. My translation. Jan Verwoert, ‘Lying Freely to the Public. And Other, Maybe Better, Ways to Survive’, Open 14 (Rotterdam: Nai uitgevers/SKOR, 2008), pp. 66–72 (see classic.skor.nl/article-3634-nl.html?lang=en). (accessed 10 November, 2012) Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 68.

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12 Impossible Participation Freee Art Collective

Contemporary Art’s ‘Athletics’ of Participation ‘Participation’ first became a buzzword in Britain as part of the New Left’s critique of democracy in the 1950s and 1960s, and was extended by C.B. Macpherson in his theory of participatory democracy in the 1970s.1 In these discussions, ‘participation’ is interpreted as a precondition for democratic society. ‘Non-participatory democracy’, therefore, is either an oxymoron or singles out a form of political organization that is not democratic in the fullest sense. Liberal democracy, with its elected political representatives, is understood to be more participatory than an unelected dictatorship, but has been viewed by some as less participatory than the form of Socialism that the New Left had in mind. For the New Left, therefore, we could say that ‘participation’ not only has been used as a concept to transform the political arena, but is itself a political and politicizing concept. During the 1980s, when anonymous market mechanisms dominated political as well as economic thought, the concept of participation fell into neglect in political discourse, only to return in the 1990s as a conspicuous political and aesthetic feature of relational art. What emerged was not merely a new type of art or a new toolbox for art, but a new criterion for judging all art. Just as the advent of abstract art made it possible – or inevitable – that all prior art would be judged in terms of its abstract qualities, the recent ‘social turn’ in art has raised participation 255

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into an obligation. Participation has become a marker in the judgment of artworks, artists, curators, and museums. It is one of the key measures in deciding questions of quality in contemporary art, and it is also a criterion by which art is rewarded financially and institutionally. It has not always been the case that commentators on art have agreed with bureaucrats and paymasters on matters of principle in this way, but the concept of participation appears to unite managers, practitioners, and audiences alike. In our view, participation is an illusory ‘solution’ to social or political problems, as it occurs only within art’s institutions. It is an invitation to audiences to take part in the relationships supported by the institution. In so far as the discourse of participation in art claims that the relationship between artist and participant is progressively reformed through pragmatic techniques of genuine inclusion in production and decision-making, it is not clear how such strategies diverge from familiar processes of incorporation, recuperation, and complicity. Advocates of participation claim that it replaces the old contract within art (dominated by the artist–viewer relation). Our contention is, by contrast, that it preserves established forms of production and consumption on the condition that some of the roles and responsibilities previously monopolized by the artist are outsourced to the viewerturned-participant. Emphasis on an ethics of participation has led to a kind of athletic display in which contemporary artists and curators compete with each other to stretch their participatory techniques further, faster, deeper, longer, wider, and stronger. The interrogation of art after the ‘social turn’ is riddled with questions such as: How early were the participants involved in the project? How much time did the artist spend with the participants? How many participants were there? How much say did the participants have in the shaping of the project or its final outcome?2 Another way of thinking about this ‘athleticism’ is to see it as a way of contributing to a competitive economy. Participation has been turned into a form of currency. We do not mean by this something along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural capital’, which in our view has set back thinking about the relationship between art and capital by several decades.3 What we mean is that participation has become an expression of value, and therefore features in competitive economic transactions within the contemporary artworld. Critics,

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for instance, may praise one artist over another because of his or her use of participation, or commissions may be more forthcoming because projects include participatory elements. Furthermore, as with other forms of currency, it seems obvious that more participation is better than less. ‘Viewers’, ‘spectators’, and ‘the public’ appear to be less fully engaged with artworks than ‘participants’. We can speak, therefore, of individuals who are participation-poor and participationrich. Alternatively, we can distinguish between full participants, partial participants, itinerant participants, and non-participants. We might even say that we have a radicalized version of the concept of the ‘death of the author’ today: one that displaces authorial power by emphasizing participation, social relations, and status at the expense of interpretation and the production of meaning.4 The problem with this development is that it merely substitutes one individual for another – reader for author – thereby limiting the potential for shared viewing and collectivity. In our view, emphasis on this kind of participation has its costs. In an important sense, the contemporary artworld seems to have forgotten how to make a place for guests. The insistence that participants be accorded a significant role within a project is the equivalent of turning down an invitation to a friend’s wedding because you feel that there shouldn’t be a distinction between those who are getting married and those who are witnessing it. ‘I’ll only come if I get married too’, the ethical participant seems to say. In our view, by contrast, inequality in such circumstances is not damning; it is built into the relations of care. Let’s call it asymmetry. There is an asymmetrical relationship between host and guest, and different pleasures and responsibilities attach to being the host and being the guest. Participatory equality cannot be forced onto these intersubjective relations without destroying the structures, pleasures, and obligations of caring and being cared for. We therefore call for a reorganization of the grammar of art’s social relations – an affirmative call to redistribute the places that we have come to occupy. While the merits of participation have become increasingly unchallengeable in critical discourses about art production over the past two decades, the alleged value of participatory practices has not been restricted to the field of art. It has entered the fields of business, commerce, education, and government policy. Everything from the

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schoolroom to the internet and from sport to the elimination of world poverty has, in the last 20 years, been reconfigured at various levels of intensity by the imperative to encourage participation. Yet participation doubles not only as an ethic, but also as a technique of capture. It homogenizes the spectrum of social encounters by arranging them hierarchically from zero to full and equal participation. It implies that the only questions to be asked of intersubjective experience are narrow political questions about who is in charge and how the people responsible have managed the process. It goes without saying that being invited to participate in a shocking event is a shocking invitation. The horror of genocide or exploitation is not dampened, but amplified by an increase in participation. If, therefore, we understand that participation is not a value in itself, but something that depends on the value and content of the project in which the participation takes place, then art’s athletics of participation is nothing but a novel twist on the old assumption that art is good for you.

Beyond the Divide Despite the increasing obligation of the artworld to turn the viewer into a participant, there does not seem to be a spate of protests coming from viewers who are denied a forum for interactivity. Few people walk out of a video installation complaining that they have not been invited to make the film. We haven’t yet seen hundreds of visitors leaving galleries because they were not allowed to co-produce the paintings on show. Even gallery-goers who witness a participatory artwork in which they are not personally involved do not appear to be kicking up a fuss. And rightly so. The viewer who rejects participation as a precondition for engaging with art should not be seen as a person who suffers socially, ethically, or aesthetically as a result. In order to achieve greater flexibility in the way in which participatory practices can be conceptualized, we suggest that the concept of the ‘actant’ can be helpful. We will argue that the field of actants in an artwork should not be reduced to a binary of any sort (artist/viewer, engaged spectator/passive spectator), and that the concept of the actant can help to move beyond the opposition between exclusion and participation. 258

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Following Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who argues that ‘the author is only an actant, the concrete speaker being interpellated in that place by the structure’ of the work, we think of artistic creation as the labour of constructing places for individuals (and groups) to occupy.5 Lecercle also shows how the participant can be understood as an actant. He ties the reader (or, in our case, the spectator) to the author, and to interpretation itself, by understanding the transmission and transformation of meaning as taking place within circuits, mechanisms, relations, and institutions of meaning-production. The author, reader, and work are bound together as elements of a single whole. Rather than thinking of the author and reader as actual subjects or as fictions, Lecercle traces a circuit of relations in which the ‘reader’ and ‘author’ are places that can be occupied temporarily by various real individuals. In addition, the structural place of the reader or spectator has various modalities: reading, for example, is not one homogeneous kind of activity, but includes a field of possibilities. The place of the reader is always the place of a specific act of reading. And the place of the reader is determined by the pragmatic conditions that happen to link reader, author, and work at a particular time. Lecercle’s concept of the actant is extrapolated from A.J. Greimas’s semantic theory of narrative, in which characters and events are understood as conforming to a grammar.6 Within the grammar of narrative, characters are redescribed by Greimas in terms of the actants that they embody. As Terence Hawkes puts it: ‘the deep structure of the narrative generates and defines its actants at a level beyond that of the story’s surface content’.7 Lecercle transposes the grammar of narrative to the social relations of reading and writing, of author and reader, in which ‘the real “subjects” of the process are not the individual agents, the real and concrete men and women engaged in it, but the relations of production that define and distribute the places’.8 The place of the reader is thus an effect of the machinery of textual exchange; the reader is produced by this transaction and simultaneously captured by it. Texts can be seen as traps for literary prey, but can also function as the provisional homes that certain readers inhabit. But this does not mean that the work has the whip hand. As Lecercle has argued, the ‘interpellated reader, although subjected as much as subjectified, is not powerless. She sends back the force of

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interpellation’.9 The place of the author can also be understood as a trap set by the reader, just as the notion of a pre-existing reader can be a trap set by the author. But this does not mean that we simply have a cornucopia of authors and readers waiting to encounter one another in a semiotic free-for-all. Author and reader are paired actants, so that each (type of) author has its own (type of) reader, and each (type of) reader has its own (type of) author. Furthermore, new readers or spectators bring new demands to old works. The task of the artgoer, therefore, is not simply to conform to the role assigned to him or her. What ties readers/spectators to authors/artists is the work and the circuits through which it flows. This is why the transformation of the reader or spectator must occur within the work and its circuits of production. The actants of art and literature are not fixed but continually renegotiated. And the relations between them change, too. Lecercle argues that we have a ‘pantomime of actants’ in which each fantasizes about the others and about themselves.10 The author cannot write without a fantasy of a reader, or of his or her own role. Similarly, reading involves constructing a fantasy of the writer and of the reader. All of art’s actants, including the participant, exist within institutions, economies, circuits, and structures. To speak of artists, authors, viewers, spectators, and participants without referring to these material conditions of actantial relations is to cut oneself off from the grammar of art’s social relations. More importantly, if the preconditions of art’s actants are not addressed and transformed, then we are condemned to occupy the places that we inherit rather than to inaugurate new places to occupy. In order to theorize the actants of art adequately, we suggest that it is necessary to go beyond institutional theory and critique, and to think about art’s apparatus.11 We suggest that the concept of ‘apparatus’ be understood as referring to the totality of social, material, economic, discursive, and institutional determinants of a practice. The emergence of a new participatory practice in art requires the transformation of this apparatus. Changing the apparatus rather than merely supplying it does not mean taking your eye off art in order to focus attention on its institutions, economies, and structures. Artists making political statements about sponsorship, for example, do not bring about the transformation of the apparatus if they proceed within conventional art genres. So

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long as the protest artist remains an author in the conventional sense (with a viewer or reader who interprets the work conventionally), no modification of the apparatus takes place, regardless of how much the political content of works by that artist cries out for change. Jean-Luc Godard was closer to what we have in mind when he said ‘the problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically’ – a statement that rightly censures political art or protest art that fails to transform the apparatus of its own production.12 Godard’s formulation, however, has the disadvantage of appearing to suggest that political content is marginal or irrelevant to a politicized practice. We would modify his idea, therefore, by identifying the problem as being how to make political art politically. For us this means not only thematizing politics, but also addressing the political and economic conditions of artistic production and consumption (which we can think of as merely the combination of two conspicuous types of political art practice today). At the same time, however, it is necessary to establish new places for the engagement with artworks, in terms of both their production and consumption. Our point is that we need to build into the grammar of art’s social relations those places that do not yet exist. Only then can engagement with art be construed as an emancipatory experience.

Impossible Participants Freee has tackled the problem of participation by creating a role for new participatory actants that is, in a very specific sense, impossible. We only want the ‘impossible participant’ – that is to say, the participant who is only possible within an apparatus that does not yet exist. We take the view that the critical and political emphasis that has been placed on participation in recent years merely serves to reinforce familiar roles within art’s existing apparatus. This means that participation simply deepens and strengthens art’s apparatus by drawing the public into its familiar modes of production. By contrast, our conception of the ‘impossible participant’ requires a search for new places for the participant to occupy within a framework of relations that remains unrealized. Although less participatory in the conventional sense, our impossible participants are, in another sense, much more vital. We can explain this more clearly with an example. 261

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Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! was a Freee project commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (UK), in 2009 as part of the exhibition ‘Generosity is the New Political’ (6 September–1 November 2009). One of the key elements in the work was the precise configuration of its social relations. First, the invitation we made was not open; Freee invited a small group of Wysing staff, artists, and trustees to participate in the event. This meant that the participants were known to one another and knew more about the institution (perhaps antagonistically) and the locale where the performance took place than did the artists. This was not an attempt to make a ‘communityspecific’ artwork, which, as Miwon Kwon has noted, typically aims ‘to foster social assimilation’.13 The group of volunteers was accustomed to hosting others. Like many other arts institutions, it regularly aimed at audience development by encouraging the participation of visitors in art projects. These are usually targeted at specific groups – the old, the young, the ‘economically marginalized’. In contrast to this, our aim was to establish a relationship that stood outside the conventional grammar of art participation. The initial dynamic of the social experience of the artwork was structurally delineated. The artists did not hold the monopoly on expertise in the work, and they were not the most at ease in the encounter. The social configuration of the invitation began, from the start, to subvert the conventional settlement of the ‘pantomime of actants’ in ways that were at once structurally clear and yet imperceptible. The work consisted of a walking tour to rename the streets of Cambridge. The participants wore bright costumes (including ‘Liberty bonnets’ as worn by Jacobins), carried percussive instruments and whistles, and read texts forming part of scripted ceremonies. The script and the new names for the streets drew on the book, The Making of the English Working Class, by E.P. Thompson – a work that outlines the key figures, events, and institutions within English Jacobinism immediately after the French Revolution.14 This included the work of radical thinkers, pamphleteers, publishers, mutineers, trade unionists, and republicans, many of whose writings had been censored or suppressed during the eighteenth century. From the local court building to King’s Passage, through residential, educational, retail, and civic areas, every street, lane, road, and square that the participants

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IMPOSSIBLE PARTICIPATION Figure 12.1 Freee Art Collective, Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! (Emmanuel Street renamed as Colonel Despard Walk), 2009.

passed was renamed after these lesser-known citizens in a ceremonial ritual performed by the participants (Fig.12.1). The ceremonies included detailed expositions of the historical significance of the new name for the street, followed by an exchange in which the new street name was proposed and confirmed in an act of acknowledgement during which the new name was written in chalk on a blackboard. Although this dialogue was scripted by the artists and took place as a call-and-response dialogue between the artists and the participants, the script which renamed the streets also renamed the individuals in the ceremony: the artists were referred to throughout the script as ‘the Chalkholders’, and the participants were referred to throughout as the ‘Witnesses’. An extract from the script follows: Emmanuel Street renamed as Colonel Despard Walk The chalk-board is placed in position. The Chalkholders stand facing the Witnesses. Chalk is used to write a new name on the chalk-board.

THE CHALKHOLDERS: We rename Emmanuel Street, Colonel Despard Walk. Colonel Despard was a member of the London Corresponding Society who was the last person to 263

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be sentenced to being hanged, drawn and quartered, in 1803, commuted at the last minute to avoid sparking public riots. He had been found guilty of high treason with evidence that he was leading a plot to seize the Tower of London and Bank of England and assassinate George III. He was arrested in November 1802 in the Oakley Arms, Lambeth, in the company of 40 workers and soldiers, and he had been at similar gatherings over the previous months in the Flying Horse, Newington, the Two Bells and the Coach and Horses, Whitechapel, the Ham and Windmill, Haymarket, the Brown Bear and the Black Horse in St Giles, and the Bleeding Heart in Hatton Gardens. THE WITNESSES: Make encouraging and celebratory music/noise. CHALKHOLDERS: We have written the name. WITNESSES: We witnessed you write the name. CHALKHOLDERS: The name was Emmanuel Street. WITNESSES: We disavow the name Emmanuel Street. CHALKHOLDERS: The name Colonel Despard Walk has been written. WITNESSES: We avow the name Colonel Despard Walk. CHALKHOLDERS: Do you believe the name of this place is Colonel Despard Walk? WITNESSES: Yes, I do believe the name of this place is Colonel Despard Walk. CHALKHOLDERS: The name of this place is Colonel Despard Walk. Make your noise in the name of this place. WITNESSES: Make encouraging and celebratory music/noise. Chalkholder # 3 washes the chalk from the chalk-board. The Chalkholders turn their backs on the Witnesses and walk to Grand Arcade accompanied by the music/noise of the witnesses. Renaming the streets might be seen as an alibi for renaming the actants of art. But this second act of renaming and reconfiguration took place within a process of transforming the world itself. We might also say, therefore, that the renaming of art’s actants was figured within a performative scenario in which the world was rendered malleable – a social precondition for the transformation of art’s apparatus. The fact that the participants were already a group meant that their experience of each other was not primarily as viewers or participants

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in an artwork, but as colleagues, neighbours, friends. The actants that the work designated had to compete with the identities and relations of real individuals. But the actants that the work orchestrated were not ‘artists’ and ‘participants’. The new ‘places’ that the work called for were much stranger than that. The act of renaming the streets functioned as a disruption of certain conventions that structure the familiar world. Freee brought a new set of meanings and associations to the street names in Cambridge in order to contest existing ones and the histories they represent. The meanings are only shared by those who ‘action’ the work in the performance, or who later read or even follow the walk at a later date. Documentation of the artwork was shown as part of the exhibition, ‘Generosity is the New Political’, in the gallery space at Wysing Arts Centre. And it was partly through this strangeness that the real individuals were converted into actants. To the passerby, this strange group in the public realm appears as a collective. In this case the passerby was not party to the ritual, and was not given information about the process. So what might have looked like a public performance was in fact a private event. This is counter to the approach of most other participatory projects, which seek to include the passerby for the purpose of generating an audience – the conventional form of public relations and spectacle produced by the publicly funded art institution. Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! is a refusal of such public relations. For us, publics are not consumers, fans, viewers, customers, taxpayers, citizens, identities, communities, clients, markets, voters, readers, victims. We prefer witnesses, signatories, advocates, spokespersons, publishers, badge-wearers, distributors, marchers, recruits, promisemakers, co-conspirators, accomplices. The latter are not necessarily more active, productive, or democratic than the publics envisioned by art galleries and policymakers. Instead, they are performatively inscribed into processes of ‘publishing’ the artwork. The ‘witnesses’ of the work are not its audience or its participants in the usual sense; they are more like witnesses at a court hearing or godparents at a christening – persons who hold a semi-legal status, and without whom the performance is a mere rehearsal or a sham. In Revolution Road: Rename the Streets!, the witnesses played a vital role within the performative act of renaming the streets of Cambridge. They had a script that placed them as communal agents in the renaming ceremony.

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But they continue to have another vital role as the memory of the work. Since there was no permanent physical alteration to the streets – no monument, no vandalism, no replacement of existing signs – the act must be remembered, documented, vouched for, and authorized. The event was documented by photographers in both still and video format. Instead of thinking that the photographer makes the role of the witnesses redundant, however, this project casts the photographers as technologically enhanced witnesses. Rather than treating the documentation of the work as external to it, the photographs and video can be seen as issuing from one of the places set out by the internal relationship between actants within the work. Another tactic Freee uses to form new actants within a changing apparatus for art is to work with manifestos and manifesto readings. This sets out places for participants to occupy that are dependent upon what those participants bring to the work both personally and imaginatively. The manifesto readings such as those for International Project Space (2007) and Eastside Projects (2011) are examples of Freee’s use of manifestos to generate agreement or disagreement on specific issues relating to, among other themes, the role of art in the contemporary public sphere, the impact of globalization on society, and the effects of market forces on art production. The content of the manifesto is an explicit call for the transformation of art and society, and Freee readily adapts existing historical manifestos, speeches, and revolutionary documents, such as The Manifesto for a New Public, based on Vladimir Tatlin’s The Initiative Individual in the Creativity of the Collective (1919) and the UNOVIS, Program for the Academy at Vitebsk (1920), and the Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art, based on The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The format of the reading includes contributions by individuals who are usually invited through our network of friends and interested associates; they are requested to read the given text and make their own minds up about which statements they subscribe to and which they reject. When at the group reading, the participants only read out those words of the manifesto with which they agree. The reading then becomes a collective, and potentially antagonistic, process in which individuals publicly declare their commitment to, or rejection of, Freee’s manifesto. Each event sees the formation of a unique ‘spoken

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IMPOSSIBLE PARTICIPATION Figure 12.2 Freee Art Collective, Manifesto reading of the Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art at the Exhibition by Freee entitled, ‘How to Make a Difference’ (2007).

choir’, in which individuals listen to each other rather than perform for the benefit of an audience (Fig. 12.2). While the use of a specific text by Freee is a given, the text itself can be used and reworked by those who read it to formulate their own opinions, just in the same way that Freee reworked it from the original. Freee acknowledges that ideas are developed collectively through the exchange of opinion. In this way Freee offers a text that it has produced, but makes it the basis for the action of critical thinking. The text of the manifesto and the group reading needs individuals who bring their own opinions to it. It is a mistake to consider the readings as performances. This is precisely the type of theatrical spectacle or performer–audience relationship that Freee attempts to overcome by asking all those who attend to contribute as readers, speakers, and debaters. The readings usually take place in an enclosed space, and all those who come along are the readers. If the reading takes place in the public realm (for example at the band stand on Clapham Common, London, in 2012), members of the group read to each other in a circle, and not to bystanders or passersby (Fig. 12.3). 267

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Figure 12.3 Freee Art Collective, reading of The Manifesto for a New Public at the bandstand, Clapham Common, London (2012).

Participation in art might best be understood as an ethical ‘solution’ to art’s crisis of legitimation. In Freee’s view, the problem calls for a political solution in which the apparatus of art is transformed, establishing social relations for art that anticipate a world beyond bureaucratic control and market forces. In so far as prominent forms of participation in recent practice have sought to hand over various capacities and privileges of the artist to the participant, the apparatus of art has simply resulted in a new division of labour and responsibility. By contrast, our call for the transformation of art’s apparatus demands new places, new actants, new roles, and new tasks for art that are unthinkable within the current configuration of art’s apparatus. This is why the only participant worth thinking about is an impossible participant.

Notes 1 2

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C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Freee art collective’s experience of this phenomenon comes from our work with state-funded art institutions in the United Kingdom. These institutions have been driven for the past 15 years by the instrumental objectives of ‘Third Way’ cultural policymakers – namely, social inclusion,

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4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

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3

regeneration, and education. Hence the economic imperative for art institutions, and those working in them, hinges on finding innovative strategies by which to increase audiences or to find new ones. The artist is expected to share in this aim. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 53. Algirdas Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1966 [1983]). Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 89. Lecercle, Interpretation as Pragmatics, p. 54. Ibid. Ibid. We take this idea from Walter Benjamin, who, in his 1924 essay ‘The Author as Producer’, extended the argument of Sergei Tretyakov that ‘specialists’ after the revolution need to perform a critical appraisal of their field rather than use it as a platform from which to issue universal truths. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Artist as Producer’, in Collected Writings, vol. 2. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Quoted in Colin McCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 19. Kwon quotes Hafthor Yngvason’s use of this phrase. See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 115. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).

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Anon., ‘Sea Point lobby group delighted at court ruling’, IOL 2010, at www.iolproperty.co.za/roller/news/entry/sea point lobby group delighted (accessed 1 June, 2012) Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2007). Asmal-Dik and Edgar Pieterse, eds, Cape 09: Convergence (catalogue) (Cape Town: Cape Africa Platform, 2009). Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Atwell, David, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992). Auslander, Philip, ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, Performing Arts Journal 84: 3 (2006), pp. 1–10. Axelrod, Robert and Cohen, Michael D. Harnessing Complexity (New York: Free Press, 2000). Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso Books, 2002). Bal, Mieke, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Bandura, Albert, ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities’, Personality and Social Psychology Review 3: 3 (1999), pp. 193–209. Barrios, Jos´e Luis, ‘Reflections around Loose Ends’, in Jos´e Luis Barrios and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer et al., Some Things Happen More Often than All of the Time, exhibition catalogue, Venice Biennale (Madrid: Turner, 2007), 142–51. and Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, et. al., Some Things Happen More Often than All of the Time, exhibition catalogue, Venice Biennale (Madrid: Turner, 2007). Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text (ed. and trans.) Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Baume, Nicholas, ed., Getting Emotional, exhibition catalogue (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2005). BAVO, ed., Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over-Identification (Rotterdam: Episode, 2007). Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996).

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Index Abramovi´c, Marina, 10, 129, 155–75, 180 and Marco Anelli, 159–61, 164–5 and Uwe Laysiepen (Ulay), 156, 161–2, 168–9, The Artist is Present, 129, 155–75, 180 Imponderabilia, 169 Nightsea Crossing, 161–2 Relation in Time, 169 actant, 188, 258–62, 264–6, 268 Adorno, Theodor, 137, 223 aesthetic appreciation, 4, 24, 28, 222 disinterested, 23–4, 78, 211–2, 221, 224 education, 2, 11, 136, 147, 226, 228, 239–44, 247, 257 elitism, 24, 88 social potential, 24 aesthetics, discipline of, 24, 28, 141, 224, 236–7, 252 relational aesthetics see Bourriaud, Nicolas affect, 7–8, 21–3, 28, 33, 148, 158–9, 165, 200, 203–4, 222 affective transmission, 22–3

crying, 10, 156, 158, 161–5, 172–174 melancholy, 83, 233 Agamben, Giorgio, 211, 223 agency and everyday life, 72 of the art object, 156 political, 38–9, 43–4, 46, 189 see also audience Almenberg, Gustaf, 6, 13 Work, Interactive Art and Relational Art (Gustaf Almenberg), 6 Anelli, Marco, 157, 159–65, 172 antagonism, 10, 89, 137, 179, 182–7, 188–9, 199, 201, 210–2 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 46, 51 architecture, 8, 38–9, 41, 44, 47, 49, 221, 225, 241 digital, 100, 117 and neuroscience, 136, 142, 146–7 archive, 9, 51, 88, 103–8, 112, 114–15, 121–2, 126–8, 130–2, 135, 139, 232, 240 digital, 98–101, 106–8 tags, 117–19

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Artaud, Antonin, 26, 31, 33, 199 audience, 1, 3–4, 12, 18, 20, 24, 39, 41, 44, 49, 53, 57–9, 62, 66–8, 70–1, 78–9, 90, 128, 137, 142–4, 148, 150, 155–9, 161–71, 173–5, 182, 187, 191, 197–204, 206–15, 218, 222, 229, 235, 239–48, 250, 252, 262–7 agency, 10, 58, 71, 136, 165, 221 as accomplice, 198–9, 202–4, 212, 265 behaviour modification, 10 as collaborator, 70–1, 79, 142, 144, 212, 224 determining role in the outcome of the work, 4–5 exclusion from, 57 and landscape, 78 as performance making, 165, 221, 267 social improvement, 60 as witness, 124, 169, 183, 202, 204, 207, 210, 258, 263–6 Australia, 3, 197–8, 203–5, 208–9, 213–14, 216–17 asylum seekers, 203–5 John Howard government, 198, 203, 212 Mike Parr’s political critique, 197–8, 203–9 authorship, 1, 6, 13, 27, 32, 42, 51, 60, 68–70, 73, 79, 83, 87, 140, 145, 163, 169, 229, 237, 240, 251–2, 257, 259–61, 269 dead author (Roland Barthes), 229, 257 open work, 136 shared authorship, 60, 68–9, 79, 136 see also collaborative art avant-garde

Douglas Crimp’s discussion of, 10–11 Peter B¨urger’s theory of, 11 and politics, 43–4, 46 and twentieth-century artistic strategies, 44, 88 Badiou, Alain, 178, 187 Barthes, Roland, 229 Baudrillard, Jean, 223, 226 beauty, 24, 28, 110 Benjamin, Walter, 41–2, 223, 226, 231, 269 Bereng, Lerato, 8, 58–9, 62, 64, 67, 73 Beuys, Joseph, 11, 79, 87–8, 93, 224–6, 229 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 225 Social sculpture, 79, 87 Bishop, Claire, 2–5, 9, 17, 60, 69, 89, 136–7, 142, 178, 181, 183, 224, 229–30 body art, 3, 10, 155, 166–7, 174, 197, 204, 206 and performance, 155, 166–7, 197 self-wounding, 158, 207 Bohman, James, 46, 53 Boltanski, Luc, 199 Borges, Jorge Luis, 113–5, 133 Bourdieu, Pierre, 208, 256 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 1–2, 37, 57, 88–9, 180, 198–9, 229–30 relational aesthetics, 1, 37, 89, 136–7, 180, 198, 229–30 Brueghel, Pieter (the Elder), 29–30 Cage, John, 99, 109–110, 150 catharsis, 47, 199, 200–1 censorship, 137, 139, 262 cities, 38, 46, 241, 267 Austria, 42–3 France, 39–40

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conference model, 241, 245 exhibition model, 243–4 festival model, 242–3 interactive curating, 230, 239, 248 new institutionalism, 246–7, 249 Serota, Nicholas, 222, 228–9 Zaayman, Carine Jozi and the (M)other City (South Africa), 61 see also Bereng, Lerato

INDEX

Japan, 50–2 South Africa, 57–9, 61–2 United Kingdom, 47, 49, 262–5 cognitive capitalism, 9, 136, 146, 147 collaborative art, 5, 8, 57, 69–70, 79, 86, 142, 169, 178, 180, 198–9 communication technologies, 37, 39, 47, 50–3, 78, 132 community, 2, 37, 49, 52, 60, 78, 80, 85, 88–92, 137, 144, 165, 171, 227, 230, 241, 245, 262 of language users, 101 political community, 208 Russian community in Estonia, 186–7 unintentional communities, 90 computer art, 3–4, 8, 13, 37–39, 41–3, 45–7, 49, 51–3, 55 artist as interface, 99, 127, 129 technophobia, 52 viewer vs user, 41–2 see also Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael conversation, 37, 88, 91, 98–101, 123, 127–8, 131–2, 141, 142 and cosmopolitanism, 46, 51 and digital media, 9, 98–100, 101, 123, 131 Grant Kester’s discussion of, 2, 70 as a model for artistic production, 42, 61, 63, 70–1, 88, 127–8 cosmopolitanism, 38, 43–44, 46, 51, 53, 71 and community, 49, 52, 70, 91–2 and democracy, 43–4, 46 and migration, 25, 43, 78, 87, 92, 203, 206 see also Appiah, Kwame Anthony Crimp, Douglas, 10–12 curating, 4, 8, 11–12, 21, 57, 64, 83, 89, 142–3, 156, 178, 224, 226–30, 239–50 community model, 241, 245

Davoine, Franc¸oise see psychoanalysis De Certeau, Michel, 72, 74 Deleuze, Gilles, 33, 36, 146, 150–1 Dezeuze, Anna, 68, 74 documentary, 20, 24, 82, 162, 164–5, 182, 185–6 Duchamp, Marcel, 141, 224 Eco, Umberto, 136 Eliasson, Olafur, 227, 231 Elkins, James, 156–158, 211 ephemera, 60, 99, 129, 171, 188–9, 197, 245 Erasmus, Desiderius, 30–1 ethics, 3–4, 7, 10, 55, 38, 89, 177–9, 181, 186–7, 189–92, 198–9, 204, 208, 210–11, 256–8, 268 film, 18, 20–21, 29, 31–35, 78–80, 91, 139, 141, 162, 179, 181–183, 189, 258, 261 Fried, Michael, 224 Gamaker, Michelle Williams, 7, 18, 32 35 Works with Mieke Bal A Long History of Madness, 18 Landscapes of Madness, 18–9 Psychoanalysis on Trial, 7, 19–34 Gaut, Berys, 4, 10, 13 globalization, 47, 49, 52–3, 82, 90, 147, 214, 266

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Godard, Jean-Luc, 138, 261 Graham, Dan, 177, 180 Greenberg, Clement, 224 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 259, 269, 278 actant, 260, 268 Guattari, F´elix 146, 151, 276 happening, 3, 8, 79–80, 82, 91, 166, 169, 224 and documentation, 79 Hartley, Alex, 8, 77–9, 81, 83–7, 89–95 Nowhere Island, 84–8 Heidegger, Martin, 104, 129, 132–3 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 137, 182 Iles, Chrissie, 156, 161, 163–4 imagination, 6–7, 20, 32, 53, 144, 150, 225, 234 improvisation, 98, 128 installation, 11, 18–23, 25–29, 32–33, 38, 138–140, 149–150, 168, 185, 187, 201, 206–7, 210, 214, 222, 224, 227, 229, 242–3, 258 interactivity and artistic research, 9, 132, 144–5 between images, 8 between word and image, 120–2 and computer art, 4, 99–102 cultural embedding, 29 definitional problems, 4–6, 17 and democracy, 2, 84, 87, 198, 208, 227, 230, 255, 265 distinguished from collaborative art, 5 and institutional critique, 11–12 and politics, 2–3, 8–10, 11, 23–5, 38, 42–4, 72, 84, 86, 90, 92, 135, 144, 146–7, 148, 188–92, 198–9, 210–12, 222, 227, 233,

294

241, 246–7, 249, 255–8, 260–2, 268 social implications, 19, 24, 42, 57–8, 71 inter-image, 29, 33 interpretants, 29–30 Jackson, Shannon, 181 Jay, Martin, 222–3, 226, 230, 233–4 Jones, Amelia, 167, 207 Kaprow, Allan, 79, 88, 167–9 Kester, Grant, 2, 5, 17, 68, 70, 88, 94, 178, 181 K¨otting, Andrew, 275, 277 Gallivant, 80–4 In the Wake of a Deadad, 83, 91 and Land Art, 8 Visionary Landscapes, 82 Kwon, Miwon, 246, 262 Lacan, Jacques see psychoanalysis Laclau, Ernesto, 142, 183 landscape, 82–7, 89–90, 92–3, 117, 147 and film, 82 and happening, 79 land art, 8, 86–7 social landscape, 8, 78–9, 84, 88–92 Western genre, 77–8, 83 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 259–60, 269, 282 Lewitt, Sol 145 Lopes, Dominic McIver, 4, 13, 41–2, 55 Lozano–Hemmer, Rafael, 8, 38–56 Amodal Suspension, 50–2 Body Movies, 45–7 relational architecture, 8, 39, 44, 49 Re:Positioning Fear, 42–3 Two Origins, 39–41 Under Scan, 47–9

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216, 218, 221–4, 226–9, 235–7, 239–42, 244–7, 250–2 BMW Guggenheim Lab, 241 Cape 09: Convergence (South Africa), 61–2 and entertainment, 226 Hayward Gallery (London), 225–6 mobile galleries, 64–7 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 129, 155, 163, 180 National Maritime Museum (London), 222 and politics, 227, 249 Serpentine Gallery (London), 241–2 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), 240, 242, 244, 246, 251–2 Tate Modern (London), 158, 222, 226–8, 236, 245 Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), 240, 249, 251 Venice Biennale, 54–5, 185, 244 white cube, 222–4, 247

INDEX

madness, 17–34, 227 cultural history of, 18, 23, 25 Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 29–30 knowledge, 22–3 medieval fools, 24 theatre of folly (sotties), 25, 27, 31–2 The Praise of Folly, 30 manifesto, 13, 92, 266–7 eArthouse Declaration of Spurious Intent (Andrew K¨otting), 80 and Freee Art Collective, 266–7 and history, 266 manifesto readings, 266 Notes on Participatory Art: Toward a Manifesto Differentiating It from Open Work, Interactive Art and Relational Art (Gustaf Almenberg), 6 Nutopia Manifesto (Yoko Ono), 92 Theatre of Cruelty manifesto (Antonin Artaud), 199 Martens, Renzo, 177–9, 181–2, 188–94 Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, 179, 182, 191 memory, 27, 83, 103, 118–19, 135, 142, 144, 146, 227–8, 266 and digital databases, 108, 127 and La Chambre Claire (Susan Trangmar), 231–3 and Milgram experiment, 210 Meskimmon, Marsha, 37, 53–4, 56 Milgram experiment, 209–10, 217–8 Mill, John Stuart, 202 Mouffe, Chantal, 247 see also Laclau, Ernesto museums and exhibition spaces, 1, 3, 7, 10–11, 14, 19, 22, 24, 26, 34, 51, 54, 78, 82, 93, 141, 151, 155–7, 159–60, 162, 171,

Nauman, Bruce, 11, 224–6, 229 Neidich, Warren, 9, 135–41, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151 Book Exchange, 136–9, 143–4 Education of the Eye, 139–41, 143, 145 The Infinite Replay of One’s Own Self-Destruction, 148–50 The Mind’s I, 141–2, 148 The Noologist’s Handbook, 142–3, 145–6, 148 and relational aesthetics, 136–7 Nitsch, Hermann, 168 Norman, Kristina, 10, 179, 182–3, 185–9, 191, 194, 284 After-War, 185–7 Monolith, 185

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Parr, Mike, 10, 197–218, 274, 279, 283, 285–6 Activities Part III iii, 200–1 Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture), 206–8 Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 (the ‘Armchop’), Rules & Displacement Close the Concentration Camps, 206 Fathers II (The Law of the Image), 201–2 Kingdom Come And/Or Punch Holes in Body Politic, Performance for as Long as Possible, 209–12 Malevich (A Political Art) Performance for as Long as Possible, 204–5 performance art, 9, 65–6, 78, 82, 98, 101, 110, 125, 127–9, 132, 136–8, 142–3, 146, 148–9, 155–71, 177–91, 197–212, 225, 239, 241–5, 262, 265 Claire Bishop’s discussion of, 9–10 documentation, 164–5, 182 theatricality, 33 photography, 10, 79, 91, 98, 135, 159–60, 162, 164–5, 169, 179, 211, 266 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 29–30 portraiture, 18, 45–7, 90–1, 139–40, 145, 159, 164 protest, 186, 203, 233, 258, 261 psychoanalysis, 7, 19–28, 31 Davoine, Franc¸oise, 20, 25, 27, 31–2 holding environment, 23 Lacan, Jacques, 28, 31 psychosis, 20 public sphere, 10, 41, 43, 46, 192, 198, 266

Ranci`ere, Jacques, 72, 136, 143, 170, 222, 233–4 relational aesthetics see Bourriaud, Nicolas Scheer, Edward, 198–9, 204, 207–8, 210 sculpture, 4, 24, 38, 67, 78, 87, 139, 180, 229 see also Beuys, Joseph Serota, Nicolas 222, 228–9, 237, 287 Sierra, Santiago, 137, 188, 193 Situationism, 8 sound, 9, 25–8, 31–3, 98–9, 110, 116, 148–9, 151, 168, 192, 242 and interactivity, 25, 27–8 and space, 26 music, 7, 25, 28, 32, 109, 124, 149–50, 264 noise, 25, 32, 109, 148–51, 225, 264, 272 political gesture, 149–50 video installation, 18 see also Cage, John South Africa, 3, 8, 57–72 apartheid, 59 socio-economic difference, 57, 59, 61 taxi culture, 58, 64–5 surveillance, 42, 47–8, 52 tactical media, 10, 179, 188, 191 theatre, 20–1, 23, 25, 30, 32–3, 101, 156, 180, 199, 221, 230 contrasted with video installation, 33–4 time, 17, 19–22, 24, 33–4, 37, 42, 62, 78, 100, 125, 127, 129, 137, 159, 161, 204, 229, 231, 242 and narrative, 18, 20, 34 temporal confusion, 20 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 2, 137, 181

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utopia, 2, 52, 60, 84, 87, 92 Verwoert, Jan, 181, 249–50 video installation and gallery space, 21–2 and interactivity, 18–9 and narrativity, 33–4 contrasted with theatre films, 18, 21, 33

Walton, Kendall, 6–7 witnessing see audience Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31, 110–13, 133

INDEX

toleration, 41, 45–6, 198, 202 Trangmar, Susan, 11, 222, 231–3 La Chambre Claire, 231–4 trust, 10, 43, 186, 198, 202, 210–2 Turkle, Sherry, 39, 44, 52, 54

Yaffe, Shlomi, 10, 179, 182–5, 188–9, 191 How I Changed my Ideology in Prague Market, 183–5, 187 Yes Men, The, 179, 188–90, 195 The Yes Men Fix The World, 189–90 Ypi, Lea, 43–4 ˙ Zmijewski, Artur 177–8, 191

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